


The Living Lost

by kayura_sanada



Category: Torchwood
Genre: (Especially Since I Have Yet To Listen To It), (Though Not Necessary To Follow The Plot), (of a sort), Amnesia, Episode: Audio Drama: The House of the Dead, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Handwavey Tech, House of the Dead Compliant, It's Been Rebuilt, Last of Erebus, M/M, Mystery, No Retcon Involved, Not Aliens Among Us Compliant, Not Miracle Day Compliant, Original Character(s), Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Series 03: Children of Earth (Torchwood), Reunions, Series 03 Fix-It: Children of Earth (Torchwood), The Hub (Torchwood), The Torchwood Archive, Timey-Wimey, Torchwood Secrets, Yearning, You Absolutely Need To Know The House of the Dead to Understand This, of a sort, the rift - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 45,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23091886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayura_sanada/pseuds/kayura_sanada
Summary: Ianto walks through the Rift – only to arrive, alive, in an unknown building beyond the edge of the world.
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Comments: 52
Kudos: 107





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> The title from “The Living Lost” by William Cullen Bryant

Ianto Jones opened his eyes.

He was standing. That wasn’t unusual; he’d been standing the last moments of his life he could remember. No. He touched his head. No, he’d _been_ standing, but then he’d fallen. Because of the gas.

He looked around. He was no longer in Thames House. The 456 no longer stood before him, and Jack was nowhere to be found. Instead he seemed to be standing before a doorway leading into an old, crowded office. “Great,” he muttered. “What is it this time?” He rubbed his head and stepped forward.

Several heads turned toward him.

He stopped again. The movements were almost choreographed; several heads turned, saw him, and perked up like they’d sniffed a scent. Eyes widened. Chairs scraped back. Suddenly there was a rush of voices, all of them scrambling together at once. He grabbed his head and winced as people ran toward him. “Stay back!” he shouted, but no one seemed to hear him. They all rushed around him. Several grabbed his arms, poked him.

“Who are you?”

“Where are you from?”

“What are you doing here?”

“How’d you get here?”

He shoved a couple of them away. Only when they fell on their asses did a deathly silence come over them all. Several took quick steps back. “Thank you,” he sighed. His head was pounding. He looked around again. The offices – cubicles, only without the walls – were two steps down from the entrance he stood upon. The two he’d pushed had fallen those two steps. He grimaced as they got up and checked themselves over. “Sorry. I don’t – where am I?”

One of the people around him stepped forward. A young-ish woman with frizzy black hair. “You’re in The Office,” she said, in a way that emphasized the words as if they were capitalized. “I take it you don’t know anything, then.”

He didn’t understand the statement, only the looks of disappointment on the people around him. “Um, no?”

Like that, their interest seemed to wane. Still, they didn’t leave and return to their work. “Well, I guess it’s something to see someone show up of a sudden,” she said, and shrugged, looking toward an older gentleman. “Should we give him a name, then?” she asked.

The older man nodded until his jowls wiggled. “Of course.”

He raised his hand slightly. “Ah, I don’t need one?” Everyone turned back to him. “My name is Ianto. Ianto Jones.”

Everyone gathered around him again, nearly crushing him between them. He got poked again. “You know your name?” one asked. The girl and old man stood, jaws agape. “How?” some man in half a business suit asked.

“Right!” The old man clapped his hands together. “That’s enough of that, everyone. If we want answers, we aren’t likely to get them scaring off the boy, now are we?”

“Where would he go?” the man in business slacks and a t-shirt asked. The question made Ianto look around again.

The doorway behind him opened up into what looked almost like a hotel lobby. A wide, domed ceiling held a golden chandelier, with marble tiles painting the floor beneath it. Beyond that looked like a French door. It had to lead to the outside. He chanced a glance at the windows, only to see them covered by white curtains from the outside. He frowned, then turned back. “So, I’m in ‘The Office,’” he said, giving the words the grave utterance the woman had first given them. “And where is that?”

The old man spread one hand out. “Here.” Ianto frowned. “That’s what we know.” The man gestured around them. “We managed to piece some things together. This is an office building, from what we can tell.” He pointed to the computers, the little desks pressed close together. The computers were those thick monstrosities popular in the nineties. “What else could it be? It’s an odd one, though. The rooms have safe boxes instead of file cabinets. We call them vaults.”

Ianto looked at each person in turn. They were all staring at him with something that looked like hope. “You’re hoping I might know more.”

They each shrugged. “Well, you do know your name.”

He cleared his throat. “Which means none of you know yours.”

“That’s right.” The old man turned to the young, frizzy-haired woman. “We chose our names based on words we remembered. “Crimped can show you around?” The girl nodded. “My chosen name is Elder. If you need anything, just shout for me. The rest of you, give him some space. It’s been a while, but I’m sure we all can remember how we all felt when we found ourselves here. Give him time to adjust.”

Everyone backed away at Elder’s words, though many looked upset at doing so. Still, the space gave him time to breathe, and Crimped sidled up to him only after everyone had left, respecting his boundaries at least a little better than her peers. “Wanna get to know this place?” she asked.

He looked around again. Doors led off to either side. He supposed she would be giving him a basic tour, and since he had no idea where he was or how to get back to Jack – Jack, who must even then think he was dead – he found no better course of action presenting itself at the moment. “Sure.”

She led him to the right first. He passed a couple of desks; a quick headcount gave him over a dozen bodies, including Crimped and Elder. Each sat in front of a computer and turned the things on. They worked, he saw. That was a good sign. Still on planet Earth, then. He’d begun to wonder.

His last moments before arriving here had been of a completely different nature to this. Everything had been harried. The last few days had been a whirlwind of action – the children, the government. Being on the run and still trying to save the world, even from itself. Crimped led him through the doorway and into what looked like an ornate hallway. Several doors stood on either side, but Crimped passed them all. He wondered if he should take a look inside. Even that action seemed like more than this building had seen in months. Unlike the last few days, on the run. Unlike the last day he remembered. He remembered them – himself and Jack – storming into the Thames House. He remembered them walking up to the 456. He remembered them losing.

Before all of that, had things been as slow and stagnant as the air felt around here?

He thought back. The children… the 456. He grabbed his head. Crimped stopped moving and turned to him, mouth open to speak, only to pause. He winced, rubbed at his temple. “I can’t remember,” he said. He looked at her. “I don’t remember.” She didn’t look surprised. He snarled. “What did you do to me?”

The woman shrugged. “We figure it’s this place.” She looked around. For a moment, those full lips of hers pulled down in a frown. She cleared her throat and seemed to force herself to brighten up. “None of us remember anything. You’re the first visitor, and you’re the first to know your name. Pretty impressive.” She leaned down, trying to catch his eyes as he studied his hands. “Wouldn’t happen to remember anything else, would you?”

He looked at her. “I remember… the last four and some change days.” He could clearly see the line mentally demarcating the first thing he remembered. The children. All standing, pointing. He tried to look further back, but it was all gone. He took a deep breath to control his suddenly racing heart. “Four days, and nothing before that.”

“Four days? Well, that’s incredible, isn’t it?” She clapped her hands together. “Exciting, yeah?” He just stared at her. He could remember remembering things. He knew that, in those four days, he had been aware of time he’d spent growing up. He could remember thinking back to life at home, in school; how he’d felt the moment he’d realized he was different than the others around him. He remembered his sister joking about him wanting it in the ass, her husband making homophobic comments right and left, and remembered exactly why he’d never told his family. Why he’d left. Yet he couldn’t remember leaving home, or where he’d gone, or what he’d done.

He took several deep breaths. Where had his memories gone? And why did he remember only the 456? Why were those memories safe when… “Wait.” He held up his hand. “I died.”

The woman’s smile dropped. “What?”

He shook his head. “I… the 456 poisoned me,” he said. He remembered how difficult it had been to breathe in, to tell Jack he loved him. He _remembered_ loving Jack. He didn’t know why, or when it had started, or… anything. But he knew he loved Jack Harkness, and that Jack needed him. He breathed heavily for several seconds. But when he’d told Jack he loved him, Jack had said simply, ‘don’t.’

“So, wait.” The woman held up one hand and scooted in, for once breaking into his personal space. “Are you saying we’re all dead?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know who you are.” There had been others in Thames House, though. He opened his mouth, then laughed. The sound was humorless. “Can’t ask you, though, can I?” He looked around. This wasn’t Thames House. “What are these rooms?”

She shrugged, looking decidedly less all right with the tour than she’d been moments before. “The vaults. We don’t know what’s in them; we’ve tried to get them open, but none of us know the codes. One person tried to open them, but…” Another shrug. “Something happened. They have tripwires or traps or whatever to keep people from breaking in. He died. Or, well. Disappeared. Does… does that mean we’re ghosts? Are we just gonna…” She cleared her throat. “Maybe we died like you did. Maybe that poison got us, and we’re in this fugue state, or…”

“There’s no point in panicking,” he said, as much for himself as for her. “Let’s just try to find out what happened, yeah?”

She opened one of the doors, and he peeked within. She was right to call them vaults; both sides of the room were filled with looked like giant safes, each embedded in the walls. They all had keypads – not the latest technology, but then again, he’d been spoiled by Torchwood. Still. It was a sight better than the computers in the office room. Sophisticated enough that it would still fit in his time period, enough that burglars would have a hard time getting in; the doors into these rooms, however, held no locks. He frowned at them as she led him past the hallway to the next room. He hissed in a short breath as they stepped through. “Right?” she said, agreeing with the wordless sentiment. “Weird. And creepy, considering the other side of this place.” She nodded back behind them, likely indicating whatever lay beyond the office doors and down the hall he had yet to survey.

The room was just as huge as the previous two. Only, this one was filled from top to bottom with the craziest artifacts. _Alien_ artifacts.

In the middle of the room was what looked to be part of an alien spacecraft, including a piece that, since the thing had been cut in half, looked into what could be compared to the Star Trek transporter room, with multiple spaces for a person to stand. Several consoles sat in front of him, buttons and levers both five feet and one foot high, either for one short person to stand beneath the taller one, or for someone with appendages near their feet. He cleared his throat and looked away.

The rest of the room held other, odder additions, ones that couldn’t be so easily named, each kept in glass boxes as if in a museum. He moved away from Crimped for a moment to study them. He’d seen crazy things all up and down Torchwood; some looked like alien fidget spinners, while others had nothing to compare them to. These were just as odd; something that looked like a burnished gold Rubik’s Cube, something else that could have been a TV remote if not for the side split into three. Two more desks sat in this room, though neither were being used at the moment. Beyond those were a simple fridge and stove and countertop, along with several chairs. It was so incongruous with the alien items all around them that he laughed. The woman looked at him.

It was all so very much like Torchwood. Jack would love the place.

Slowly, the laughter died. How did he know Jack would like this place? He recalled so very little about the man. He was ageless; that he could recall, though he didn’t remember how he knew that. Immortal. A vampire? The thought was ridiculous, and yet he couldn’t say it was wrong. As for the man’s personality – angry. He remembered anger more than anything, and of course, he remembered Jack agreeing to let children be taken by the 456 back in 1965. A monstrous thing to do, and yet Jack had done it. To try to keep the 456 from destroying the planet, yes, but still. Why did he love Jack again?

Perhaps because, when the world had gone mad, Jack had stood before it, and the 456, and said _no_.

Ianto had stood with him. He’d refused to let Jack stand alone. And for that, he had died. Died, and the man he’d loved had demanded he not tell him he loved him. And then had sworn to never forget him, even after 1000 years.

A lie. People couldn’t remember the names of high school classmates once they hit their thirties. A thousand years was too long to remember a single man, no matter how ‘good’ it had been.

“So this isn’t as odd as we’ve thought it should be?” Crimped asked.

“Oh, no. It’s odd.” He nodded. “Very odd. Em, I take it this is the reason the windows are covered.”

“Covered?” She looked over to the windows, then back at him, eyes wide. “Oh. I guess you haven’t really seen that yet. Well, there aren’t any windows on the other side, so this is your best chance. Get the panic out of your system before going back to the others, you know?”

That sounded promising.

She waved him over to the nearest window. Slowly, he made his way to its edge. The curtain spanned the entire window, even below it and to its sides. He craned his neck back and forth for a moment, only to stop and stare again, brows furrowing. He didn’t see any edges to it. No billowing folds, no fluttering in some wind. Curtains always folded in on themselves. They were made to do it. These didn’t.

As he got closer, he understood why. There were no curtains. That endless expanse of white was all there was beyond the panes of glass. He stumbled back again, as if to be too close was to fall into it.

It was like space. Only white. Endless, endless white. “What is this?” he asked, going for calm and sounding more panicked. So much for his words of wisdom earlier.

“Dunno. It’s how it’s always been. Well, for us. As far as we know.” He looked over to her. “It hasn’t always been like this, has it? I mean, the computers show pictures of buildings, right? And they’re all surrounded by other buildings or trees or whatnot. So we’re supposed to have all that, too, right?” She hugged herself. “Or is this what the universe is really like, and people just imagined all those other things?”

“No, this isn’t normal,” he said. He dared go near the glass again, even touched it. It was cool against his fingertips. “The trees and buildings is the normal stuff.” He pulled away again. He only had a few days of memories, but he had gone in and out of several buildings, even then. Just the effort of getting peoples’ credit cards had seen him in and out of restaurants, shops, diners. Each of them had been part of the world. This looked more like it sat in the middle of nowhere. As if it had been rendered as a graphic on a computer, but never given any background graphics. A building trapped in a world of white space. “Anyone ever opened one?”

“Once. All the air got sucked out. Not noisily, or anything. Just – there, then gone. And it felt like we were fading away, too. We haven’t opened one since.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “All right.” He thought. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of what it might be. He knew he should know – he remembered being the one Gwen and Jack and just expected to find the answers, but he didn’t know why. He… he couldn’t remember. He remembered standing in the Hub, and knowing it was called the Hub, but he couldn’t recall what he did down there. He’d made coffee a couple of times, and tea, and he’d cooked. He’d also gotten the most cards back. Jack had said it was because he had ‘the face of a salesman.’ He’d argued it had been because of his suit.

Despite all of that, he was certain he’d once have been able to find such information. Still. “We can try to find out what this is. We might be able to find a way out of here.”

Crimped tilted her head at him. “You think there’s a way out?”

“Don’t you?” He turned to her. “Haven’t you all tried?”

She shrugged. “Sure. Doesn’t mean we got anywhere. And it’s not like we really knew for sure there was anything else, did we? The computers gave us information, but who knows if it’s true? I mean, from what the Internet shows us, you need things to make the computers run that we don’t have.” She gestured outside, toward the white, and he had to concede the point. Without any memories, who could say what knowledge was true and what wasn’t?

“So what _do_ you people remember? No personal memories, but information, clearly.” He started back the way they came.

“Yeah. Language. Elder was the first to point out we knew how to talk and read. Sharp pointed out that we could write it, and that we recognized which words linked to certain objects and ideas. Hence his name, you know.” She shrugged, following after him at a short clip. He barely glanced at the doors to either side of him. “And, well, we know how to type on the computers and all. Notion says we’re probably just some game system. Like we’re characters. Pieces on a board.”

“Until I came along,” Ianto said.

“Well, yeah, I suppose.” They entered the main room. People had moved from the chairs; someone was running his fingers along the doorway Ianto had arrived in. The man had to rearrange himself on the floor; he wasn’t the skinniest person, but he maneuvered himself into a sitting position and continued checking the wall. Another man followed after a woman, both of them glaring at each other as they moved toward the back of the room. The woman yelped and tripped, only for the man to grab her. She glared at him. “Nice catch, Med!”

The man let the woman go and waved.

“That’s Med,” she said, pointing to him. “Short for Medical. First time Injury fell, he knew how to patch her up. We’re running low on supplies now, though, so he hovers over her a lot. She hates it.” She grinned at him. “Funny, that, eh? If we’re ghosts, I guess ghosts can get injured.”

And die, if there’d really been another of them who had gotten hurt by the vaults’ security measures. “I don’t think we’re ghosts,” he said. Their conversation was getting some attention. He made to pass through the room and found himself stopped by a lean man with spiky hair.

“Ghosts?” he asked, looking back and forth between them. “Why are we ghosts?”

“Notion,” Crimped said by way of introduction. “Ianto says he remembers dying.”

Inwardly, he sighed. That got everyone’s attention, even the two ready to fight in the back. “Let’s not discuss it,” he said.

“Died?” The spiky-haired man followed after him. “So we’re all dead? That actually explains a lot. Maybe we’re in limbo.”

“Or hell,” someone else called out.

“It explains why we’re never hungry,” the man continued. “Or thirsty, or tired.”

“Not like that stops Lounge,” someone said. A few people laughed.

Ianto gritted his teeth. If he was dead, then that meant he wouldn’t be seeing Jack again. He wouldn’t allow it. For whatever reason, he loved that man. He wouldn’t let himself be pushed to the side. “We’re not dead,” he said again, growling. “What would be the point of feeling pain? Of having a spaceship in your side room? Of needing to keep the windows closed?” He waved his hands around. “Of me showing up here? If this is death, or _ghosts_ , or whatever, it doesn’t explain my being here.”

“Maybe you died here,” the chubby man spoke up.

“No,” he said, voice short. “It wasn’t here.”

Crimped hummed. “You really remember it? Dying?” He nodded. “Sounds awful,” she said, voice going low. “You’re too young for it to have been an easy death. Right?”

He looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Right.” He’d taken only a single step further before she’d run up to him, coming up on the opposite side of Notion, who followed by his right. “Only, you’re the only one who can remember anything. The first clue we’ve had in forever. So anything you remember, anything at all. It helps.”

“Right. Only I don’t remember this place, or arriving here. So I don’t think it does.”

“But we don’t remember anything. Imagine that. Not knowing _anything_. Not even knowing for sure what the world should look like.” He paused at that. “We don’t remember ever seeing trees before. I mean, we must have done, surely. But we don’t remember it. Don’t know what they feel like, or smell like. Simple stuff, probably. For people out in that world the computers show us.” He turned to her. “We remember things, sure. Words and shapes and colors. We know how to use the computers, but not the vaults. We know the word for keypad, but not how to make them open. We’ve been here for who knows how long, with nothing to tell us about anything.”

“You’re the first thing that’s ever changed around here,” he said. “The first person to show up since all of us. If you died – or almost died – then whatever happened to you might be similar to what happened to us. Maybe it could give us a way out of here.”

He thought about the computers. “Have long have you all been here?”

“Who knows?” the man shrugged.

“The computers should have dates on them. You should have been able to catalog time through that, if nothing else.” He motioned toward the desks behind them.

“Those things don’t make any sense. Here. Look.” Notion held out his wrist. On it was a simple watch, a black leather band with a silver face. He looked at the thing, only to see the hands of the clock steadily moving forward. The hour hand slipped from four to five to six as he stared. “Sometimes they’ll go backward. Oftentimes, they’ll stop, or just swing wildly. I have a theory.”

“He has a lot of theories,” Crimped said, leaning up to whisper in his ear. She grinned widely over at Notion. Notion harrumphed.

“Anyway. I think we’re in a sort of time stasis, or time bubble. Outside of normal time, you know?”

“He reads the weird stuff online,” Crimped said in explanation.

“Ah,” Ianto said. He wondered, however, if Notion wasn’t on to something.

Did the 456 have some sort of way to keep people outside of time? Could that have something to do with how they’d managed to keep the children from 1965 from aging? But how could that possibly explain how he’d gotten to this strange place, or why he couldn’t remember anything before the aliens’ arrival?

What had happened to him? What had been in that poison, to put him in this state? Or had something happened afterward? Had he been saved from the poison, only to be taken from Jack’s side and holed up here? He looked at Crimped as he headed down the second hallway. Unlike the first, no doors broke up the white of the walls. Crimped looked at him, likely feeling his gaze on her, and smiled. “Soon you’ll find out the biggest mystery of this place.”

“Other than the ‘trapped in the middle of nowhere in a time bubble?’” Ianto asked.

Crimped’s smile turned a little rueful. “Yeah. Other than that.”

He opened his mouth to ask how that was possible, only to stop dead, the answer before his very eyes.

Before him, the hall opened up into yet another large room. This one _did_ have a door leading into it, one that clearly had been locked at one point, and locked well. On every side, vaulted cells lines the walls, floor to ceiling. Each was open now, with cots that looked to have been primped up. Someone even lay on one, hands behind his head as he shifted on the cot.

But most important was what was emblazoned on the top of every cell.

He paled.

“Can’t find anything on the team,” Crimped said, her voice oddly excited. “Dunno if we were experiments, or spies, or something. But it’s gotta be some sort of government secret, yeah? I mean, what else could it be, with these weird cells? Looks like an experiment gone wrong. That’s what most of us think.”

He sucked in a deep breath. “I think I found the connection between us.”

Above every cell, in big brick letters, hung one word: Torchwood.


	2. Chapter Two

“Gwen, take a look down the street over. Try to flush him out.”

“Gotcha.”

Gwen’s voice crackled over the speaker in his ear. He also caught a huffed breath; Gwen was running to do as he said. “See anything?” he asked.

“Nothing.” A few more huffs, then, “I hope Andy’s doing better with his little fetching job than us.”

He snorted. “He’s with Norton. I’ll be happy if they get anything done at all. It’s just an old artifact, however. Shouldn’t give them _too_ much trouble. I hope.”

“Shouldn’t have left them alone over in Cardiff, huh?” she said on a breathless laugh.

He winced. Just hearing the name made him want to break something. Run away. Scream.

He saw something move along the street before him. The United States rarely had empty streets in its cities, no matter the time of day. These streets, however, were desolate. Too close to the suburbs, perhaps – or, more likely, too close to whatever creature had stolen the Angolians’ regency brand. Which he would consider only a minor inconvenience if the Angolians hadn’t brought a warship into Earth’s orbit an hour ago.

“Gwen! I think he’s over here. I’m gonna lead him over to you.”

“All right. I’m ready.”

He raced down the street, shoes clapping on the cracked blacktop, until he saw movement in the darkness once more. “Hey!” he shouted, trying to catch the person’s attention. From the way the form froze, he thought he had. “I’m with Torchwood. Stop running.”

Oh, yeah. This was the person he was looking for. An ordinary person wouldn’t have heard that little message and decide to book it even faster.

“Gwen! It’s coming your way!”

“I see it!” she said, then, “hold it! You’ve under arrest for theft of a planet’s monarch’s property and for – oh, blast it all!” Gunshots echoed down the street.

“That’s my girl!” he said on a grin. He ran after the creature, blocking off its escape from Gwen. The thing was lean, with a bulbous head. Almost like a Weevil, he thought, once again thinking for a moment on the past. He gritted his teeth. He’d told himself when he’d come back that he wouldn’t be like this. He’d _decided_. “Gwen, don’t shoot me; I’m coming up behind him.”

“Well, if you are, you’re doing a damn good job staying hidden!” She sounded out of breath. “Feel free to shoot him whenever!”

He raised his gun. “Freeze!” he shouted, giving the alien one more chance. It just tried to go even faster. “Well, can’t say I didn’t warn you.” He fired. His aim was true; on a cry, the alien fell, clutching its right leg. He hurried up to it and pointed his gun at its head. “I already said freeze. I’m not going to repeat myself.” The creature stilled, its nose twitching madly. Likely scenting him. With it detained, he looked around, then frowned. “Gwen? Did you fall behind or something?”

“Me?! Where the hell are you?!”

He could only hear her voice through the speaker. He cursed. “You’re chasing someone else.”

“There was only one on the wanted file!”

“Yeah, well there’s two of them now.” He kicked the one he’d caught. It stopped sniffing the air and glared. Its eyes were small and hooded by a deep brow. “You wanna tell us where your friend is?” Silence. Of course. “Just hold on, Gwen. I’ve gotta get this guy ready to meet the Angolians, and then I’ll catch up with you.”

“Oh, great, take your time, eh? Just like a morning jog, this is.”

He chuckled. “I knew I could count on you.” Gwen got the last word, for once, spitting out a breathless curse at him before focusing on keeping her target in sight. “All right, you. Let’s go.”

* * *

The chase went on until the wee hours of the morning; the Angolians had been impatient, but Jack had managed to talk them down from artillery bombardment by showing them the first thief – an old Gulgrax, oddly enough, considering how few made it to old age and how even less ran from a fight – and assuring the Angolians that humans were not only not aiding and abetting the criminals, but for the most part were unaware that said criminals could even exist. (And if he’d had to throw the Doctor’s name in there, well, it was the least the Time Lord could do for failing to show his face through the near-catastrophe.)

The identification of the Gulgrax had managed to explain one other thing – the second man. “Gulgraxi,” he explained to Gwen when she remarked that they looked the same, “have the ability to split their bodies multiple times. Useful for fights, which the Gulgraxi are known to start at the drop of a hat. Thing is, each time they do, they split up their intellect, too. Too many times, and they’re little more than beasts.”

“Useful for fights,” Gwen said, echoing him.

“Unless you want to win,” he argued, pointing down at their second captive as the Angolian warship prepared to beam both him and his other self up. “This guy must have been a commander, to live so long and still have enough brains left to run from Torchwood and not toward. Commanders were forbidden from splitting because of the need for strategists.”

Gwen hummed, not really interested anymore. “So why did this strategist steal some royal seal and bring it here?”

“It’s a brand. They mark the rightful ruler on the face. As to why – that, I couldn’t tell you.” He waited, gaze on the two bodies before him, silent from then on until the two bodies of the old Gulgrax were gone. Then moved away to watch the monitors in the new hub, tense and silent still as he waited until the Angolians were gone. “Well,” he sighed finally, “Earth is safe for one more day.” He turned to Gwen with a grin. “Want some breakfast? I’m starving.”

Gwen gave him half a grin – the half that apologized and asked for forgiveness. “Sounds great, but Rhys must be worried sick. I promised to be home hours ago. I’m gonna go see him, cook up some ham and eggs, then kiss him on his way before crashing. If Anwen’ll even let me shut my eyes.” She turned to leave, only to pause and turn back to him. She bit her lip. “You good?”

He shrugged. Tucked his hands in his pockets. Smiled. “Of course. As always.”

Gwen nodded, clearly knowing better but not calling him on it. Kind of her. “I’ll tell Anwen you said hi.”

“Give her a kiss for me.” She nodded. It took a while, but finally she got in her car and drove away. He sighed.

In just a few days, it would be five years since Ianto had died.

He closed his eyes. Five years. For normal people, that would be quite a long time. For him, immortal as he was, it was just a drop in the eternal bucket. And yet it was over double the length of time he’d had with Ianto. He sucked in a deep breath. Such a short amount of time. Even if he’d been mortal, it would have been considered too short. For him, it would be the equivalent of hours. No. Minutes. Minutes in an endless life, and yet still he felt the loss of Ianto so acutely it might as well have been millennia. And even that wouldn’t have felt like enough.

But this was his lot, to keep moving forward in this ceaseless life. It was the future Ianto had chosen for him. This eternal life of his was a gift not just from rose, but from Ianto, too. Ianto, who couldn’t imagine a universe that didn’t have Jack in it. Just as Jack couldn’t fathom this world anymore. He looked at his hands. This, his continuing existence, was what Ianto had wanted. His final wish. Jack wouldn’t squander it.

But… sometimes. Sometimes, on days like this one, when he could nearly remember the taste of Ianto on his tongue. On days like this one, he would let himself mourn. Just a little bit.

Just a little bit.

* * *

Ianto stared at the time at the side of the ancient computer’s Start Menu. It read 6:14 AM, April 8, 1991. He cleared his throat. “And you’re saying this is not what it said yesterday.”

“Yesterday? This morning? Two weeks ago?” Crimped shrugged, reaching up to twirl a thick curl of her hair around one finger. “We don’t eat or sleep, and we don’t have anything to accurately measure it, so it could be any time, really. But the last time it decided to settle down, the year had been 2004. October something, 2004. Isn’t it wild?” She gestured toward the computers themselves. “Sometimes it acts like little more than a newsreel, you know? And other days it does amazing things, promising food on your doorstep in fifteen minutes, promising to call someone, even renting you a hotel on the moon.”

“None of that works for us, obviously,” a new voice said. It came from a man hunched before another computer, his thick glasses sliding dangerously low on his nose. He pushed them up without once taking his gaze off the screen in front of him. “Our money isn’t recognized, it often asks for things we don’t understand, and on the rare occasions we can hack our way through that, it doesn’t recognize anything that might be this building.”

Crimped leaned over the man’s shoulder; he grimaced. “Hey, Drive. Anything new?”

He fixed his glasses again. “No.”

“Hey, if we’re ghosts,” Notion said, “maybe that’s why this is the only place we can see. They say ghosts can’t leave the place they’re haunting, right?”

“Who’s they?” the wide man asked, still testing the area where Ianto had arrived, this time inspecting the floor.

Notion waved his question away. “It’s on the Internet. Anyway, if we all died here and are haunting this building, that could explain why it looks like there’s nothing beyond this place. Maybe for us, there just isn’t.”

“And I’m here because why, exactly?” He clicked on the keyboard, only to watch the screen flash and blink. He took a deep breath. These people might not remember better machinery than this, but he certainly could.

“Because you died here, too,” Notion said as if it was obvious.

“No,” he said, trying again to get the computer to cooperate. “I didn’t. I died in Thames House.”

That got him a few looks. “In London? What on Earth got you to die there?”

His lips thinned. He didn’t think it wise to tell these people about the 456, no matter that the building had ‘Torchwood’ written on it (with the same amount of subtlety as Jack employed, if he remembered his short few hours in the Hub correctly). They may have been captives, or may have simply stumbled upon this building. More than them being the source of oddity here, it might be the building itself.

In that way, the one he might want to speak with was the one still poking around the doorway he’d found himself standing within.

“Maybe you didn’t die there,” Notion spoke up. Instead of sitting normally in one of the chairs provided, he hitched a leg onto a desk and leaned precariously close to one of the monitors. “Maybe you just fell unconscious, but someone saved you and took you somewhere else. Maybe you were brought here.”

He frowned. Jack could very well have found a way to save him. What did he know? He remembered only that he used to know Torchwood well; he couldn’t remember anything about the place that would support such a belief. Perhaps there _was_ something that would have saved him. Perhaps Jack had used that something to keep him alive.

But then what was this place? The new Torchwood, after the Hub had been destroyed? “Let’s just go on the idea that we aren’t wasting our time,” he said finally. Dead or not, ghost or not, he had to get back to Jack. It was all he really knew, but it was important. Jack needed him. It was one thing he knew without a doubt. Jack needed him. And he loved Jack.

“Wait.” He leaned forward, squinting slightly at the poor screen resolution. “Wait,” he breathed. Early 90’s Internet wasn’t anything like the few memories he had of being online back before he’d died. It had only a few chat rooms, all of which needed passwords; they were clearly for military and, perhaps, a few enterprising researchers. Thankfully, just like Torchwood was supposed to, these computers managed to enter with a simple password. The one with glasses, named Drive, was the one to give it to him, finally turning away from his own computer to watch Ianto’s progress.

1991 Internet was little more than text page after text page, and each of these were nothing more than forums. Message boards. And most of those were to give ideas or information on the few computer programs working at the time. Still, it was something. And since they had no idea when time would jump again, he had to hurry.

He went to a random forum – he didn’t really care which. This Internet was so old, anything he posted was almost certain to be lost. The best he could do was say or start something so revolutionary it was remembered. Doing so might mess with time or history or something. He grimaced.

It was the only way to reach beyond these walls.

He posted a single post on this first board, maxing out the small word count within a few minutes. He might have let slip the idea of time and space being energies that could push and pull items around any tears within their structures. He called it a Rift, and posited that they might be found all across time and space, naturally or, even worse, due to time travel.

Of course, it didn’t take long for his ‘hypothesis’ to be picked up by those few on the Internet at that time. The moment someone responded, he sighed in relief. “Got a hit,” he murmured. Drive leaned in further, adjusting his glasses and frowning slightly. “If we’re lucky, that’ll garner enough attention, maybe even become a legend.”

“An interesting idea,” Drive said, then, when Notion and Crimped asked for clarification, read out what Ianto had written. “Do you think that’s what’s happened to us? Do you have any evidence?”

“I don’t think that’s what’s happened to us,” he said, but he wasn’t sure why. Finally he shrugged. “Maybe it is. But this is something I remember – the Rift. It’s something that actually exists, though I don’t know if it was known back then. I don’t remember.” He touched his head, grimaced, then forced himself to move past it. “If this survived the 1991 Internet, then it might reach the ears of others who might recognize the description. They’ll go looking for this, and I made sure to sign it with my name at the bottom.” He pointed to the last two words on the screen, saying simply ‘Ianto Jones.’ “If they see my name, they’ll know something’s up.”

Everyone was staring with varying degrees of interest on their faces. “We wanted to try that,” the matronly woman said, coming up to them for the first time since they’d all crowded around Ianto at the beginning. “Without our names, however, the only word we could drop was ‘Torchwood.’ Those posts quickly got deleted, leading us to believe the term to be a top clearance secret.” She stopped before him; he was surprised to see that she was actually quite short. She hadn’t seemed like it from her stature. So close, he could smell a soft scent; she was wearing perfume. “And you say you recognize the word.”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And you’re making no effort to share the meaning with us.”

She didn’t say it like it was a question, yet her very presence had him answering. “No, ma’am.” He cleared his throat. “But I can tell you that it isn’t an experiment or anything. It’s… an organization.”

“Then could we have been a part of it?” Notion asked, leaning a little further. The desk groaned.

“Get off of that before I have to use our last bandages patching you up!” the middle-aged man in the back shouted. Notion jumped off of the desk, nearly tripping in his haste. The man in the back sighed.

“Sorry, Med!”

The older woman ignored them. “Do you believe that to be likely?”

They were certainly odd enough, he thought, then wondered why he thought that. Gwen was nearly normal, though he and Jack were as odd as they came… he thought. He’d thought of them as outsiders to the rest of the world during those days. Was there a reason beyond just them knowing about the threat the 456 posed? “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Maybe you are. Maybe you aren’t. Maybe there’s another reason you’re here. Maybe you were pulled here for another reason, and I’m simply here because…” He gestured toward the left, where the hall led to those cells and those inscriptions. “Because I’m with Torchwood.”

The woman cocked a single eyebrow, and he realized that was the first time he’d admitted to being directly affiliated with Torchwood. Oh, well. The information would need to be spilled eventually, most likely. Best to have them know now and avoid the suspicion later.

“Your suit makes more sense now,” Notion said, and Crimped nodded.

“What does that mean?” The man in half a business suit spoke up from his own desk. He glared over to Notion.

“Aw, chill, Sharp. You aren’t in a full suit. You look like you were getting ready for a date and got bored halfway through.”

The glare deepened.

“Ignore them,” the older woman advised. “I know it must be overwhelming, being in this situation and being surrounded by strangers on top of it.” She laid a hand on his shoulder. He shivered, thinking of Jack. “For now, we’re more interested in the chance to reach out for the first time. If you’re heard, then all of us are real. You’re our first real chance out of here.”

“Sorry,” he said, and waited for her to pull her hand away before continuing. “I’m not really doing any of this for any of you.”

The woman nodded. “Of course not. But we still benefit. Because of that, we are willing to help you.”

He nodded. Their conversation had been long enough for five more responses. Two were merely scoffing at his post, but the other three started speaking on the knowledge of time and space, how they work, and whether his argument might have some merit. He grinned. Even if he changed history, it would likely only affect science fiction or time travel research. Hopefully not too bad; he didn’t know when the date on the computers would change again, or whether they would remain in the past. If time shot too far into the future, Torchwood wouldn’t recognize his name anymore. Unless Jack was still there. Would he be?

He rubbed his head. This was just a shot in the dark. He needed something more concrete. He stood. “Could you tell me when the date changes?” he asked Crimped, ignoring, for the moment, the older woman.

Crimped nodded. “Sure thing. Um, Fragrant? You think it would be all right?”

“Of course. We should make Lounge do it; he’s been laying on that cot out there for hours.”

“Now, now. Nothing too urgent is happening at the moment; let him rest.” Someone at another desk piped up. Ianto didn’t bother naming them all; he left toward the person checking out the building.

“He’s rested enough,” Sharp said with a scoff.

“It’s not like he can sleep,” Crimped said. Ianto heard her running off and hoped someone would tell him. He didn’t really care who.

“Hello,” he said, standing beside the portly person as they sat studying the floor tiles. The person turned to him. This close, he could see long eyelashes, an overly large shirt, and thick lips. He blinked rapidly, his gaze automatically lowering to try to re-gauge his initial assumption. The person chuckled lightly.

“I prefer ‘they’ or ‘them,’” the person said, and struggled to his – _their_ , he thought, mentally reorganizing things – feet. The person held out their hand. “”Name’s Shape. The others thought it was a smart name. I have shape,” the said, indicating their body with their free hand as he shook the proffered one, “and I’m the _shape_ of a person, though I prefer not taking any particular form.” Shape shrugged. “As I said. They thought it was clever.”

“Do you not like it.”

“Better than nothing, isn’t it? And it’s not like they insult me or demand I choose one, so I don’t mind.” Shape sat back down. “Time to go around meeting everybody?” they asked.

“No,” he said, a bit shorter than he’d meant to be. It garnered him another look. “I’m wondering if it’s not us that’s special…”

Shape beamed up at him. “But the building instead,” they said, finishing his thought for him. “I’ve been thinking the same thing!” Once again, Shape pushed themselves up from the floor. “What if it’s this building? Or something _in_ this building? There are so many weird things. Haven’t figured out half of them. And we can’t get in the vaults, so whatever’s in those could be the reason we’re here, too.” Shape hefted up their pants and waved at the doorway. “Do you remember anything about your first moments here? Did you feel anything strange?”

Ianto took a quick look around. Most people seemed to be ignoring them, their focuses set on his computer screen as responses poured in. He ignored it and looked back toward Shape. “I didn’t feel anything. One second I was…” He considered his words. “Dead, or unconscious, or… and then I was here.” He took a deep breath. “No displacement, no ears popping, no dizziness. I don’t even remember opening my eyes.”

Shape made a humming noise, stared at the walls for a moment, then walked into the front room. Slowly, Ianto followed after him. He didn’t feel anything strange moving through the doorway, and he didn’t find himself suddenly standing in another building. Instead he came to stand beside Shape and tilted his head up to stare at the doorway where Shape stared. “What have you found?” he asked, expecting nothing.

“Old 16th century stone. Eighteenth century tiles, worn and frayed by constant walking. Windows from the early 21st century, save for those in the room with the spaceship. Those look old, but are far thicker than the others. They’re also able to be hidden so that the walls look to have no windows at all. The ceiling is domed, the full building – that we’re able to see; who knows if there’s more, or if there’s some sort of secret area we’ve yet to discover – is 5765 square feet.”

Ianto held up a hand. “You’re been studying this place for a while, then.”

Shape smiled sheepishly. “Uh, yeah. Since we arrived, actually. It’s the only thing other than us that’s here. We can’t study our own histories; we don’t remember our names, and there’s too many people in the history of Earth that could match our vague descriptions. The most we can learn is about this building. I’ve asked Drive or Sharp to try to figure out which building this place is, but they’ve argued that the weird paraphernalia would make this place a government secret or something.” Shape shrugged. “I just don’t think they see the building as important.”

“Everything’s important,” he said. He looked toward the computers. He couldn’t look up any information at the moment; the Internet lacked the materials necessary at the moment. “As soon as we can, I’ll look it up,” he said.

“I think Fragrant tried,” Shape admitted, voice dropping. “Pulled up a bunch of places in Rome. Just think Torchwood is Italian, though.”

“I… dunno. I think I did, once,” he said, grimacing at the admission. Those few days didn’t focus too heavily on Torchwood, its history, or its workings. It focused primarily on the 456. “Either way. We’ll check every building we can, call up any blueprints, and walk through them. Slow progress is better than none. Probably.”

Shape smiled widely at him. “That would be wonderful! I’ve already gone through a few, but there are so many. And I’m not the best at searching the Internet. The words don’t arrange the way others say they do. It’s confusing.” It sounded familiar, but it wasn’t part of Ianto’s four days, so the description didn’t click the way Ianto thought it should. “Fragrant has tried, as I said, but she’s also been looking through the items and trying to get into the vaults, so she’s been busy with her own work.” Shape shrugged and looked at the floor. “The others are doing their own things, too.”

“Except Lounge,” Ianto said, seeing the man who’d been sleeping on the cell cot nearly being dragged up by Crimped. Lounge caught sight of him, as well, and stared. He nearly fell when Crimped tugged him forward again. “Do you have any of the blueprints printed out?”

Shape shook their head. “No. You can’t print things out on the printer here. Don’t know why.” Shape pointed over toward the front of the building; Ianto could see the wide French door, beyond which could only be a continuation of that white emptiness, and a long, wide counter that swept over half the room. “I drew a lot of them out, though, if you want to look through them.”

Ianto nodded. “Let’s get started.”


	3. Chapter Three

Jack laid back on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. This was the day. This day five years ago, Ianto had stood with him against the 456 and fallen. Died, he forced himself to think. The most final word in the English language. And then, half a year later – another day to ‘celebrate,’ he thought, and forced himself to not show his reaction to it on his face – he’d said goodbye again. He breathed in. Out. An action that would never stop, no matter how hard anybody tried.

Gwen had gone home to her husband and her daughter. He was alone in this small, yellow-brick building, the workings of the Hub replicated as best they could be while they dealt with problems in the United States. Eventually, they would finish their work here, leave things to Rex. Soon, they would pack up and return, perhaps save Andy from Norton, help him find his alien device, since he had yet to discover it. Days would continue on. And on. And on.

He leaned up. This was why he kept himself busy. Idle time meant reminiscing, and that, he couldn’t abide.

“All right! Show me what you got.” He played around on the computer, searched up Andy and Norton’s progress – they found a talking cat, a flying eggplant, and a dancing sapling. He sent them a message telling them he believed the device to be one that quickened a living organism’s evolution, then checked up on Rex’s team. They were acclimating well. Rex had sent him a few questions about immortality, but Jack couldn’t answer them at the moment. He didn’t have the strength. He looked for something else.

Torchwood had once had files upon files of unsolved mysteries, dilemmas, and odd happenings. He’d once gotten Ianto and Gwen to help him with the oldest of them. But that was just one of several. He couldn’t remember all of them; only the ones that had stuck with him. Time had a way of erasing memories, fading out emotions.

_A thousand years’ time, you won’t remember me._

He sucked in a deep breath. Not those emotions. _Not those_. As much as it hurt, he didn’t want to lose those emotions. He didn’t _want_ to forget.

“There has to be something,” he growled. Pushing away from the computers, he paced. Everything he could remember to take up his time was back in Cardiff. Eventually, he would have to return to those streets. There were only so many places on Earth. It was why he’d left to begin with. A whirlwind of planets and people, places he slept and those he slept with. Most, he hadn’t even bothered to learn the names of. Even more, he’d left before the night had been over. A quick romp and then another run, another planet, another person. Next, next, next, until he realized there was even less meaning out there among the stars than here. Even less tying him in place. Living forever had already gotten old mere months after running away. So here he was, starting again, trying to find something to tie him down. And still, he couldn’t find it.

Missions helped him pass the time, occupy his mind. If he didn’t have one, then this horrible spiral would return. He couldn’t stand it. There had to be something. The Rift was gone, but that didn’t mean that the world had calmed. He just needed another disaster, another mystery. America was so large, parts of it so ancient. There had to be something here. Preferably within driving distance.

He went back to the computers, set in a bunch of buzzwords, and let the system fly. He wasn’t nearly as good as Tosh; he would take the first random thing the computer spewed out at him and would do his best to act as if it was definitely a Torchwood thing.

It took several minutes. He spent the time pacing back and forth and listing out the Torchwood members he’d known from the first to the last. He deliberately stopped before he reached the end, then started a new list, this time going over the missions he’d been sent on. A lot of them had faded into nothing; several more were little more than rehearsed lines, as he remembered making this list before. Still, he continued, trying to pin down memories until, finally, the computer pinged him. He nearly raced to it.

It was a message. To him.

He frowned and sat in his seat. The message was to Torchwood’s old Hub. It was something only members of Torchwood should have known about, let alone have had access to. Thanks to Ianto, parts of the Hub had been saved – the man had always kept access to it on his phone, which Frobinger had eventually returned. It had become the heart of the new system. Jack tapped into it now, pulling up the messaging system. For a moment, he thought he might have gotten something from the old phone, some old message Ianto may have attempted to send before things had gone too far. For that wild moment, he thought he might have found something of Ianto he hadn’t gotten before. Then he read the date it had been sent. He crushed the mouse beneath his fingers.

Today. It had been sent today. Five years after Ianto’s death.

His first response was to close it, delete it, and run. No. His first instinct was to read it, devour it, suck it in like a dying man with a spare drop of water. He hungered for even the lie of something from Ianto.

The rest of him reacted with rage.

He opened the messenger and, forcibly keeping his gaze from what was written, responded with a quick, ‘once I find you, you are going to wish you never tried to impersonate him.’ Then he started searching for the IP address.

* * *

Ianto didn’t know how long they spent working through Shape’s buildings. Many were easily dismissed; any built past the 1500’s, any made into historical landmarks, any not matching the dimensions they were certain of – the ones with windows leading out. Shape had trouble reading the dimensions, saying the letters weren’t in the right order for them, but with Ianto’s help, Shape quickly flew through the list.

Others, however, couldn’t be dismissed as easily. There could be a second floor, Shape posited, that they simply weren’t privy to, or spaces underground. They’d made their way through dozens before Ianto realized he wasn’t hungry, or thirsty, or tired. He questioned it, only to have Shape wave his concern away.

“That’s the way of things here,” Shape said. “We’ve all had our share of theories. Lounge has been the one to insist we’re all dead, and has decided to just… exist, I guess. The rest of us think it might be because we’re trapped in time, or outside of time, or even that we only appear human.”

“You don’t seem largely concerned about it,” Ianto said.

“Don’t know how long we’ve been here, but it’s been enough time to get used to it.” Shape looked over the papers scattered around them. They’d set themselves up in the front lobby, taking over the long countertop for their work. Crimped had come and gone, leafing through their piles before she got bored and went somewhere else. For a short time, the clumsy woman had come over to sit with them. She’d mumbled words under her breath a few times, clearly translating what she was reading from what sounded like Spanish. Her hair, a deep, exotic brown, fell into her face enough time for her to scowl and wrench it back, swearing to cut it the next opportunity. Shape had rolled his eyes at that one. She’d left eventually, though she’d promised to return once she’d found something to pull her hair back. A crash had occurred shortly thereafter. Shape had told Ianto not to wait up for her.

Ianto wasn’t certain how long he’d been there, himself. Time had continued on with as stagnant an air as the building. His own watch, forgotten on his wrist until he’d randomly tried to check the time, only to find the hands frozen. Shape had chuckled at him.

It all made him very aware how reliant humans had become on time and being able to tell it. He yearned to hear someone call out for him, if only to tell him time had actually passed _somewhere_ , if only on the computer screen.

“Ianto!”

Shape nudged him. “That’s your cue.”

He blinked. “I hadn’t just imagined that?” Shape chuckled again. Ianto stood. “Right. Thanks. I’ll be back.”

Shape just shrugged again. “Okay.”

He got the feeling Shape didn’t really believe him. He frowned. While it was true they hadn’t gotten any closer yet, they’d only just started. They were going through only those blueprints Shape had copied down onto computer paper, and even those they hadn’t fully gotten through yet. Then there were others they could search for. He wished he could remmber more – if he knew where all Torchwood could be found, he might have been able to narrow down prospective buildings further.

He entered the office room and headed for the man with tousled hair. “You called?”

The man pointed to the screen. “Changed.” Ianto leaned over to look. “So you’re real. Huh.”

The man had an American accent. Ianto grunted, reminded viscerally of Jack once again. Of all the memories he still retained, Jack was the brightest spot in all of them. The affection he felt for the man was ridiculous, considering he couldn’t place where it had originated, or even why it existed. “The numbers are going insane,” he said, surprised despite the fact that Crimped had told him they did as much. It was one thing to hear it, another to see. The screen was a blank screen, for the most part; the Internet he’d had open was gone now, and in its place was a blank background and an archaic start menu. A start menu with a broken clock.

“They do that. Everybody thinks we’re moving through time or something during it.”

He remembered Shape saying this guy thought they were all dead. “Or perhaps we’ve moved into a time that doesn’t support the Internet.” Lounge made a considering noise at that, but Ianto leaned forward a bit more. He could almost swear he’d seen something there. He looked around. Every computer was on. He frowned and reached down to the power button. Lounge caught his hand. “I’m curious about how the software would handle being in this limbo,” he said.

“The systems are all connected,” Lounge said. “Drive has already said there’s a chance of it all being lost. It’s our only link to the living. You want to use the computers? Yeah? Then leave them on.”

Ianto let his hand fall. Lounge let go. “So,” he said. “I guess that means we’re supposed to wait.”

Lounge returned to a chair, leaned back in it, and closed his eyes. “We can do that for a long time.”

Ianto looked around. Only a few people remained in the room; himself, Lounge, Crimped, Elder, and Drive. The others had wandered off. An itch was starting just beneath his skin. He wanted to move, too, to _do_ something. To find some sort of results, whatever they may be. “Right.” He stood. “I’ll be heading back to Shape, then. Tell me when it changes again?”

The guy shrugged. With nothing else to do, Ianto returned to Shape. Time may not have been moving, but he could feel it wearing down on him, anyway.

* * *

He should have been tired. After staring at blueprints and dimensions and even, after a time, speaking with Shape on the color of the stonework from outside after so much time and how thick the stones might be, after measuring the windows’ dimensions again because they needed to be _certain_ the dimensions were one inch off from a potential match, he should have a headache and be ready to hit something. Instead, he felt just as rested as when he first arrived in this place.

He looked upon the scattered remains of their piles. They’d gone through them all again, only to come up with the same answer as before. “A dead end,” Ianto sighed.

“It’s farther than I’ve come before,” Shape said. They didn’t sound nearly as defeated as Ianto did. While Ianto scrubbed at his face, Shape leaned their arms onto the countertop and stretched. “This is so much progress! I’m so happy!” Shape caught the look on his face and laughed. “I guess you think it’s been a long time. We used to. All of us, we’ve gotten really used to timelessness. But I remember being unsettled. Scared, even. I didn’t even know my own name, where I was from, what the world looked like. This has been everything. Everything I know is here.”

He looked around when Shape indicated the building. He couldn’t imagine. If he’d arrived without even the four days he had? How would he be responding now?

“What we have, we have,” Shape said, nodding as if they’d just said something wise. Perhaps they had. “We’ll work with it, take it a single step at a time.”

Ianto breathed in and out a few times, forcing himself to be calm. “Well, there is _one_ good thing to all of this.”

“What?”

“I’m not tired.” He stood. “I’m going to go to the vaults. Maybe I’ll find something I can use there.”

“Good luck,” Shape said. They waved him off as he made his way to the vaults.

* * *

Fragrant was the quietest of the lot thus far. She did little more than nod in his direction before returning her attention to the vaults and the items on her lap. “Anything?” he asked, feeling more like an intruder in this quiet space than he had since entering.

She smiled a bit, though she didn’t look at him again. “Getting frustrated?” She didn’t wait for an answer, either. “Others have likely been telling you to calm down, to recognize the stillness of this place. Yes?” He opened his mouth to affirm her words. “Ignore them,” she said. She looked back up at him. Her face held more determination than he’d seen anywhere else. He sighed in relief.

“I will.”

He stepped further into the room. Getting closer to the vaults, he was able to see the wires, wrapped in a clear glass, leading away from the keypads and into the walls. He guessed, seeing as they had yet to be touched, that messing with them would instigate the destruction hinted at by Crimped. He bent down.

“I don’t understand any of this.”

Fragrant chuckled. “Not surprising. Everything we know, we learned from the computers. I convinced Elder to have one taken apart.” He looked up, surprised. She just continued studying the items in her lap. They seemed to all be metallic. “I wanted to see if there was something in them that made them linked to the rest of the world while the rest of this place floated in this white hell, but nothing.” She sighed, settling for a moment. “We know so little. The items in the Artifact Room are still completely beyond us. We have yet to name this building, or even know what time period we’re supposed to be from.” She sighed and leaned her head back, closing her eyes for a moment.

Everyone here seemed so weary. He was terrified, watching them, that he would end up the same. “So. Walk me through it, then.” He reached out. “Are they safe to touch?”

She waved him on. “Go ahead. It’s the keypads we have to watch out for.”

He touched the front of the vaults. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. For the metal to electrocute him? Grab him? Explode on contact? But nothing. It was a little bumpy, cold to the touch, and clearly thick. He knocked on it and got only a thumping sound. Very thick.

“We think whatever’s inside these things are likely more dangerous versions of the odd doohickeys in the Artifact Room,” she said. From the few memories he could conjure of the Hub, she was likely right. “If we can get them open, we might have a way out of here. Or we may find why we’re stuck here. Or,” he said, and chuckled lightly, “we can accidentally get ourselves killed.”

“Suppose that would prove we’re not ghosts, at least,” he said, and got a laugh out of her.

“Morbid humor! I like it.”

It was even easier working with her than it had been with Shape. Whenever things got too quiet, leaving him too much time to think, she would accept his attempts to start conversation. They would talk quietly about the building, about his and Shape’s struggles, then, fifteen minutes later, segue easily into a conversation about what London had looked like. She took any topic he threw out and turned it into real communication.

Like that, they spent a long period of time working together to build, as Fragrant explained patiently, something she found on the Internet that was supposed to hack into keypads. She had all the necessary materials, either scrounged or snapped off of other items around the building. “Do you think it will work?” he asked.

“It’s not about whether it will work. It’s about continuing to try. Not giving up.”

He understood that. The itch between his shoulders was increasing. If they didn’t make progress soon, he thought he might go mad. Of course, what would that help? That would only slow progress down even more.

“So you really don’t remember anything,” he said, yet another attempt to begin conversation. It was rude. He knew it was. But Fragrant didn’t so much as twitch.

“It must have been killing you to keep yourself from asking us that.”

He blushed. “Ah. Yes.”

“We had nothing. We wandered in this building like babies just learning to walk. It took us who knows how long to even notice the computers; they sat amid a veritable sea of odd devices, many far flashier than them. By the time we realized we could actually type on the strange letter boards, an unknown amount of time had passed.” She twisted a couple of wires around themselves. Ianto could do little more than hold the unused items for her, since he had no idea what they were supposed to be for. She reached out a hand. “The bent metal with the blue line on it, please.” He handed it to her wordlessly, still amazed she knew how to describe things without making him confused. Her retelling of her first days here, however, was starting to give him a clue. “What we know is all twisted up. Episodic memory is out the window. Language memory is in.”

“You can’t remember your pasts, but you can talk and read,” Ianto said, nodding. “And type,” he recalled.

“Yes. Motor memory, or muscle memory, we believe it’s called.” She smiled a bit; it was clear this was not knowledge they’d had at the outset, but that which had been brought about by research on the computers. “Our semantic memory – that is, our ability to recognize things – is a bit… off. We think we still have our implicit memory, but that our semantic memory is gone.” She cleared her throat. “In other words, we remember how to type, but we don’t remember what a computer is. Medical knows how to bandage a wound, but he doesn’t recall how he learned it. Drive knows the ins and outs of computer software much better than all of us, but he still wandered around not knowing the importance of the machines.”

It sounded like hell. “So semantic and episodic are gone. Any clue why those two?”

“None. Notion has been thrilled to give us several ideas, however.” Another smile. She reached out her hand. “Two wires, please. One copper – burnt orange.”

He did as instructed, though he was happy to realize he knew what copper wires looked like. “No idea why I wasn’t as affected.”

“You likely aren’t linked the way we are. All of us may be here for the same reason, but not in the same way. And vice versa. We may have all come to be here the same way, but not the same reason.” He watched her slide a third wire into the unknown device, then coil the copper wire around all three. “Perhaps your method of arrival differed just enough to alter your state when you arrived.”

There were so many ‘perhaps’es and ‘maybe’s that it felt more like they were shooting in the dark. The conversation dwindled once again as he failed to hold up his side of it. He wondered if he really had survived that poison. Had Jack managed to get him out somehow? No, he didn’t think so. Or else Jack would have done it before then. Despite the fact that Jack hadn’t wanted to be in a relationship with him, the man had certainly cared. _I’ve only scratched the surface, haven’t I?_ But though he’d only seen the first layer of Jack, he knew Jack had wanted him to live. He… thought he knew.

“Perhaps only slightly,” he said, then realized he’d spoken aloud. “I only remember a few days,” he reminded her.

“I’m surprised the others haven’t inundated you with questions,” she said in response. A subtle reminder of the story she’d just given him.

“Right. Only I haven’t really given them the chance to.”

She chuckled again. “The orange piece and the flat square.” A few moments later, “three screws.”

There were only three left. He handed them all to her, along with the screwdriver. He had nothing left in his hands.

“There.”

She held up her device. It looked like a mangled wreck, but even he could see the small buttons and the screen. A homemade hackpad. “Not bad,” he said. She looked it over, then nodded her approval at her own achievement. “Shall we attempt to blow ourselves up, then?”

She looked at the vault closest to her. “How do you want to go out?” she asked, clearly indication he should choose the vault.

“Well, one could always hope they kept the most important things close at hand.”

She stood. “Well, then. let’s see if whoever owned this place was gracious enough to think of us.”

Together, they headed to the front of the room. There were several rooms, but thankfully, they’d already positioned themselves in the one closest to the Office. From there, they needed only to stand at the front to be face to face with the first vault. And it truly did look like a vault, albeit a miniature one. Each individual safe stood over two feet deep and raised nearly to the ceiling. The only things depicting their individuality was the number on the door into the room – this room had a “1” on it – and the numbers on the vaults – unsurprisingly, this one at the front also had a “1” etched into it.

Fragrant didn’t bother with fanfare. She simply leaned down and got to work. He watched, ready to grab her and throw her out of the way if she happened to trip something. She pressed buttons for a god, long time before sighing and saying, “back to the drawing board.”

The vault clicked open.

They both stared for several moments. Then Fragrant whooped. “We did it!” she said, jumping up and down, decorum momentarily forgotten. She grabbed him up in a huge hug.

“I barely did anything,” he said, but he couldn’t help smiling. Both of them turned to the vault. Fragrant pulled at the door, straining a bit to open it. When she did, she peered inside and gasped.

“Well, no alien device,” he said. Still, he couldn’t help but reach inside and pull out the first thing he could.

“No,” she breathed. “It’s better.”

Piles upon piles of folders rested within the vault. The one he’d pulled out had ‘Case 10733’ written on it. He opened it and began skimming the first page. It spoke of two members heading off to investigate a building from which odd lights had regularly gone off. The two members, a Mr. Harrow and Miss Cavendish, had investigated, but had found nothing. Minor injuries had been sustained on the part of Miss Cavendish, but they’d apparently been self-inflicted from a minor fall. “I think we may know the name of your Injury,” he said.

“Really?” Fragrant gasped again. She snaked out a hand and yanked up a folder, herself. “Oh, oh! Look at this! Case files. Reports. _Names._ ” She breathed the last word like a prayer. She returned the file, careful now to return it to its exact location, and then searched down the papers and folders until, reading the numbers, she found them to be in descending order. “I need a ladder.” She raced out, shouting for someone to come help.

He read a bit more. The building with the strange lights had been investigated several times over the span of multiple months, until finally Miss Cavendish and a Mr. Webber found a number of aliens having what amounted to a frat party within the building. They, being able to camouflage themselves, had managed to evade being spotted on every previous attempt. This last time, it seemed one of them had had a little too much of their equivalent to spiked punch, and had fallen from the rafters. They’d been brought in and cleared out after that.

Eventually, Fragrant returned, a new person in tow. This man was bulky enough to wield the ladder he carried with one hand. He placed the ladder down, ran his fingers through his short-cropped black hair, and turned dark eyes on Fragrant. “Want me to get it down?” he asked. She nodded emphatically. “Yes. Get it all down, starting with the first.” She pointed to the top left metal shelf. The man climbed. “Thank you, Uncle,” she said, as if only just remembering the words.

“Sure! I can’t believe you got this open,” he said, grunting a bit as he strained himself upwards. “I didn’t think it would work. Thought the government wouldn’t have something that would be so easily hacked.”

She humphed. Ianto doubted there’d been anything _easy_ about it. “They’re old, and so are their systems. We’ve already considered the idea that the building would be difficult to get into, considering the things just lying around. It’s no surprise that there wasn’t better care to ensure the vaults remained secure.” Her lips were thin, however; she clearly disapproved of it, despite what it meant for her and the others. Seemed some part of her was strict on this sort of thing. If these people were who he was beginning to suspect – members of Torchwood – that would also make sense.

Uncle came down with the first few folders. He handed them off to Fragrant, then climbed his way back up. Fragrant barely got them balanced in her hand before she flung the first folder open. “Oh,” she breathed. Ianto couldn’t help it. He leaned it to see. He inhaled sharply.

TORCHWOOD FOUR

Lead Officer: MS. GAIL LAVERNE

Secondary Officer: MR. LLOYD HARROW

Other Members: MISS SUN TAE-YEON  
MR. EMRYS GARDNER  
MR. DACK ATWORTH


	4. Chapter Four

Gwen yawned her way into their makeshift command center just as the sun was starting its descent. Jack rushed past her, a whirlwind of activity. She stood in the maelstrom for a moment, blinking. “Good afternoon,” she said.

“Good afternoon, sleepyhead.” He bonked her on the head with some papers as he passed her. She scowled and tried to fix her hair. “Nice to see you. Hope you’re ready for some more excitement. Someone’s managed to hack their way into our computer system.”

That got her attention. Suddenly she was done yawning. “What? Who?”

“Best guess?” He slapped the papers onto the computer desk and glared at the readouts thereon. “Frobinger gave Ianto’s cell phone to someone before returning it to us.”

“And it took them five years to learn how to use it? Sounds like the US government.” She came over to check the papers, brows climbing as she saw the readouts on the Rift, the surrounding area, and Ianto’s phone history.

He snorted. “Can’t see the British government giving the US government anything. Unless they bullied Britain into giving it to them.”

“Not impossible, considering,” she said. She picked up the top page. “Why are you looking at the Rift?”

He didn’t answer. There was no point in telling her he’d hoped, foolishly, for the impossible. “Searching for anything that might explain why, even with Torchwood’s resources, I’m unable to find an IP address, a nation of origin, anything.”

“Nothing?” she asked, her voice incredulous.

“Nothing,” he affirmed. He took the paper back, stuffing it at the bottom of the stack. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to find when he’d run that particular scan. The Rift was closed. Yes, time and spacial anomalies persisted there, but the displacement was controlled now, little more than leftover energy. It would remain for likely only a decade or so more, then would dissipate naturally. There was nothing left. Ianto had seen to that.

“How is that possible?” She went to the terminal, clicking through the tabs. “Torchwood finds everything.”

“Not this guy.” He growled. He couldn’t help it. He’d been working on this for hours, and he was no closer to finding the bastard responsible. “He was using Ianto’s old messaging system.” The thought of it still left him wanting to punch something. Everything. Five years. Five years, and someone still wanted to use his memory of Ianto against him. He wouldn’t let them.

“Uh, Jack?” Gwen clicked on a few more things. Jack kept himself busy pacing while she got herself caught up. “Jack,” she said, more seriously this time. He stopped and looked at her. “This is the message sent, right? Did you actually read this?”

He wanted to break the computer. He’d already thrown a teacup, however, and he would have to be content with that. Without… without Ianto, those kinds of things had to be cleaned up by himself.

“Yeah, ‘course you didn’t. Get over here.”

He looked away. “I don’t need to read it.”

“Yes, you do. Now get over here.”

There was no arguing with the woman when she had that tone to her voice. He trudged over, hands in pockets. The screen showed the messages, just as he’d feared. He gritted his teeth. He could still see his threat to the person who’d gotten in touch with him. Gwen, however, was eyeing the message below that. Jack frowned. He’d sent his threat and closed the messenger down, unable to bear the sight of Ianto’s name on the top of the header. He and Ianto used to text each other often, call one another just as much. They had been each others’ speed dials. They would sometimes even send messages through their computers. He would ask Ianto if he was coming up, or if he could bring a coffee (which usually led to something else), or if he wanted to stay late (which meant late night activities). He used to always smile when he saw Ianto’s name pop up on his computer or his phone. It used to make his heart jump in his chest.

Gwen pointed up at the thing, forcing him to read it. When he did, he leaned closer.

“If it helps,” she said, and for a moment her voice was as dry as Ianto’s when he’d managed to make them all look stupid, “I think I found out why you can’t find them.”

_Well, I found Torchwood Four for you. That’s the good news. Interested in the bad news?  
Once I find you, you are going to wish you never tried to impersonate him.  
Okay. Feel free. Here’s a hint: I’m in Torchwood Four._

Jack sat down hard in the desk chair.

* * *

“This one’s most likely you, Soldier. You’re the only person here who’s from that region.”

A short, heavily-muscled woman – the one he’d noticed always stood straight at attention and refused to sit – blushed. “You…” Her voice was high-pitched; she curled her fingers in the thick fabric of her shirt. “You think so?”

“Definitely!” Notion clapped her on the back. She didn’t so much as flinch. “It’s gotta be you. We’re all from different parts of the world.”

“So…” She stared down at the paper Notion had handed her. Behind them all, Fragrant rifled through the veritable mountain of paperwork, moving methodically down the list of folders and case files. “My name is Sun Hae-Ran?” She said it perfectly, unlike Ianto when he’d tried, though he thought he’d gotten fairly close. Hae-Ran kept staring at the paper.

“Yeah, guess so. So how’s it feel?” Notion asked.

Hae-Ran shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s just a name.”

“It’s _your_ name,” he corrected.

“ _Al-a!_ ” She snapped. Then, sheepishly, “but that doesn’t mean it _feels_ like my name. It just… feels like _a_ name.”

Notion looked a little disappointed, but while the others clustered around the hallway leading into the vaults, he just laughed. “Well, it’s not like hearing your name will make you remember anything. But now you have a name! That’s great.”

“Yeah,” Crimped said, and touched Soldier’s – Hae-Ran’s – shoulder. “After all this time, we have something solid. We’re finally on our way.”

“That’s right,” Elder spoke up. Together, he and Crimped got everyone excited again. In no time, they were back to discussing who was likely to be whom.

“Looks like you’re not the one in charge, though, Elder,” Notion said, snatching the paper from Hae-Ran when it became clear she wasn’t going to stop looking at her name any time soon.

“That feels weird,” Lounge admitted.

Ianto tuned them out and looked back to his own folder. It held no new information, save the names of two people who apparently weren’t there when Torchwood Four first formed.

Torchwood Four. He felt like he should recognize that, somehow. He knew he was from the Hub – Torchwood Three, also known as Torchwood Cardiff. He knew, also, that there were, or had been, other Torchwoods. The memory was vague, and didn’t link to anything within those four days, but he was certain of it. He remembered thinking about it while speaking with his sister, about the ‘hard time’ he’d gone through once. How many were there? What had he once known about Torchwood Four?

“Hey, Fragrant said you thought you knew Injury’s name?”

Wordlessly, he handed over the folder. Notion opened it immediately. Ianto moved away from the group, wandering idly over toward the Office. It was deserted now, for the first time since he’d first arrived. He sat in the chair he’d taken before and scrubbed his face. He still didn’t feel tired. Instead he felt like he _should_ be tired. He’d been working for hours, at the least. His head spun with everything he’d seen since arriving.

He hadn’t given himself the time to reminisce properly. To go over the scant few memories he still held. They returned easily, each moment he reached for them. The 456. The children, pointing up to the sky, beginning to count down arrival times and then, suddenly, the number for ten percent of the child population. He remembered meeting with his sister and her husband, dealing with the fallout of having failed to show up for the kids, simply giving them money because he felt guilty about not being able to give more and not willing to stomach being someone other than who he was; someone who didn’t work in Torchwood and didn’t have a male lover and didn’t fight aliens.

He remembered Jack rebuffing the idea of them as a couple. Jack still keeping secrets, even though he gave Jack everything. Him telling Jack he loved him and Jack saying simply, “don’t.”

He took a deep breath. He hardly knew the man, yet every time he thought of him, he ached so deeply it tore at his skin. He also remembered Jack being shot, being blown up, being trapped in cement, being killed and killed and killed, and every time, being forced to endure survival. He remembered Jack holding on to him tightly when he returned to life, leaning in and breathing hotly against Ianto’s throat, shivering as he relived the experience of his death for the thousandth time.

Jack needed him. Jack needed him, and Ianto loved Jack.

He leaned forward, thinking to play with the computer, maybe make a list of his memories in order, or make a list of pros and cons of the man named Jack Harkness. But he stopped as his gaze slid over the date. June 20, 2151.

It had changed again.

The Internet, when he opened it this time, looked so disparate from the monitor he viewed it on that he had to rub his eyes. It was whiter, crisper. The resolution was far higher than anything the computers should have been able to handle. His hands shook as he reached for the mouse. Unthinking, he tried the password given to him before and searched for Torchwood’s message board. He shouted inarticulately when it popped up. Torchwood still existed in the 22nd century!

He typed into the message board, only to pause before sending anything. No one he remembered would still be alive, save for Jack. And would Jack really have remained with Torchwood all this time? Why? He couldn’t imagine staying somewhere where the fragments of ghosts could still haunt him. Still, it was worth a try.

_This is Ianto Jones. I’m sending this message from Torchwood Four._

He waited, breath held in his chest. He couldn’t expect anything. Nearly a century and a half had passed since his supposed death. Still, if Torchwood still existed, they may have information on Torchwod Four. Its history, its whereabouts. Something. Jack was immortal. Even if Ianto returned a hundred years late, Jack would still be there.

But no one else would be.

That would be a problem he would deal with once he got out of this hell. For the moment, he needed to focus on how to escape. That would be miracle enough.

_Ianto?_

A reply! He scooted forward in his seat so fast it screeched across the floor. He touched the word that had popped up on the messenger. Static crackled along his fingers.

He took a chance. _Jack?_

_It’s me. I’m here._

He chuckled madly, nearly sobbing in relief. He held himself from smashing into the desk as he doubled over. “Jack,” he whispered. The name sounded so melancholy on his lips. He didn’t know why. He just wanted to be next to Jack again. He missed him. He chuckled again. He hardly knew why, but every part of him yearned to reach through the computer and touch Jack.

 _I didn’t think Torchwood would last so long in the technological age,_ he typed, feeling lighthearted for the first time in… perhaps for the first time in memory. Well. The memory he had left. It felt nice.

 _It didn’t,_ Jack typed in response. Ianto read it with a frown. _Well, not really. Gwen kept it going for a while. Rhys helped. And Andy._ Ianto couldn’t recall who Andy was, but he vaguely remembered Gwen mentioning Rhys. Her husband? _I only left this open for you._

Ianto read that line a few times. He felt more and more uneasy each time. _What do you mean?_

The reply was a little late in coming. When it did, Ianto felt the blood drain from his face. _How many times have you gotten in touch with me before now?_

* * *

“Torchwood Four,” Gwen real aloud, tapping her first finger on the keyboard. “I thought you said it was lost.”

“It was.” He read and re-read the words in disbelief. “There’s no way it’s back. The Red Key wouldn’t give them that sort of out.”

Gwen looked at him with furrowed brows. “What in the world are you talking about?”

He pushed away from the machine again, thinking. “Whoever this is, they found a way to reach through to Torchwood’s systems despite whatever may have happened to them.” It wasn’t Ianto. No matter how much the tone of the texts sounded like him, it couldn’t be. Ianto was dead. And yet it wasn’t someone pretending to be Ianto, despite what he’d thought. This was a distress signal, and he’d been too angry and upset to notice it. “Try to get in touch with them.”

“Aye, aye,” Gwen said, and started typing. Once she was finished, she turned back to him. “How long until they respond, do you think?”

He shook his head. There hadn’t been a trace of Torchwood Four since it disappeared off the map. No one knew exactly what the Red Key had caused to happen. Bad luck was its forte, though it was known to show people the future – as in the case of Alex, who had killed all of Torchwood Three’s employees because of it – and more. He’d been so worried about its influence that he’d had it shipped off to Yvonne. That hadn’t ended well.

Whoever this person was, they’d ‘found’ Torchwood Four, and they were trying to get back. “Dunno. They might not be able to again. Well, looks like our search and destroy has turned into a search and rescue.” Gwen rolled her eyes. She wasn’t making fun of him for his defensiveness now, but he wouldn’t count on her keeping her silence for long. He clapped his hands together. “Let’s get started. They’re not on Earth.”

“Because they don’t have an IP address.”

“Exactly. And they’re not on the normal, physical plane.” He started pacing again.

“Or else they would show up on the scanners? Do they reach that far, to cover the whole universe?”

“No. But you’re forgetting something. They’re using our Internet.” He stopped pacing just for an instant so he could face her. “We’re sending out signals across the galaxy every day. And the universe is picking up on them. Radio waves have been broadcast across the universe for decades. How do you think…” He breathed on, out. “The 456 found this planet not because it was so special, but because it had been sending evidence of its existence. ‘We’re here, we’re here. Easy marks. Vulnerable. Technically defended by the galactic federation, but too far on the edge of the galaxy to be properly protected. Perfect targets.” He swept his hands out on either side of him, encompassing within them the world. “We haven’t come into our own yet, not really.”

“So what does this have to do with where this person is?” she asked. Always getting to the heart of things.

“That’s just it. Those waves travel at a certain speed, and range out specifically from this planet. For someone to be sending a signal to this place and this time, they’d have to have picked up the signal and sent it back. This system, Ianto’s personal messenger? That didn’t exist before Ianto joined Torchwood Three.” Her eyes widened in understanding. “And it was in his possession at all times, save for the few moments it was dropped or momentarily lost. Ianto was too studious to have that happen to the point where it got taken to wherever Torchwood Four could be.”

“So it would have to have been in the last five years.”

“Five light years,” Jack confirmed. “There are a few planets within that zone, but none that are inhabited. The closest that has a sustained population is about six to seven light years away.”

“Oh,” Gwen said, her voice going soft. “That’s a bit closer than I thought.”

He snorted. “We aren’t the only ones out here in the galactic sticks,” he said. Gwen grinned. He grinned back.

“So it’s a place that has to be on Earth, but isn’t on Earth.” Gwen gasped and smacked her palm with her fist. “That’s why you were looking at the Rift!”

It wasn’t. His thoughts had been far, far away from searching the Rift for anyone other than Ianto. But now that Gwen said it, it seemed so obvious. “But it’s closed,” he said, even as his mind raced.

“Yes, but there’s still those weird emission things. They’re strong enough that you said the Doctor guy could still fuel up there, even years down the line from today.” That was true. The Doctor could stop off in Cardiff at any time. Yet another reason why Jack had needed to stay away – he couldn’t stand the idea of being there when he did, of how he might respond to see the man and demand to know why he hadn’t been there, why he’d let Jack live forever but had failed to save the world when Jack had needed him. When Ianto had needed him.

Ianto was gone. Ianto had been gone even before Jack had gone to the so-called haunted brewery. But what if the Rift was still giving off enough emissions – and taking in enough emissions – that things lost in the Rift could still be linked to their world? Just enough to send a message through the Torchwood Wi-Fi messaging system.

Just enough that, just maybe, he may be able to speak with Ianto?

Even as he ordered Gwen to call the airport for tickets to Cardiff – even as he raced to grab his jacket – he knew it was insane. Chances were slim to none. Ianto was dead, he told himself again. He was never coming back.

But there was a _chance_. And Jack would take it.


	5. Chapter Five

The others had mostly figured out which names were theirs, though Ianto couldn’t handle both the old names and the new ones. Everyone walked back and forth practicing the names out – Lloyd, Dack, Carmen. Over and over again, back and forth, until finally Fragrant entered the Office. “Everyone, stop!” Despite Elder being the leader, everyone shut up and turned to Fragrant. The woman put her hands on her hips.

Ianto would put money down on who Ms. Gail Laverne was.

“Yes, it’s exciting to finally have some answers as to who we could be. I want to personally congratulate Miss Sun and Miss Cavendish. But we have something more important to focus on.” She raised one hand, still holding a folder, and pointed around the room. “We’re still trapped here. Do you think it’s easier to guess who we might be, or return to the real world and have someone take a sample of our blood, or our fingerprints?” Silence. “That’s right. We can have a few people continue trying to find out our identities if you like, but we must concentrate on putting what we’ve found to good use.” She looked at Ianto. “We have a chance now. Mr. Jones has already reached the outside world. Let’s all try to do the same, shall we?”

“And, what? Use the names in the folders?” Crimped asked, though she moved to a desk to do as told.

“Those, and the name of this place. ‘Torchwood Four.’ Inundate the Internet. Send out signals for help. Tell people what this place looks like. Miss Cavendish, Miss Sun. You’re the ones we can guess best are real and here. We don’t want people calling us liars because they personally buried the person we’re pretending to be. You two will be the names we drop. That means we want your voices in there. Hopefully you’ll sound similar to how you used to speak. If not, well. It’s something.”

Fragrant got the others working. Ianto stared at the screen. The dates were going mad again, no longer stuck on the 22nd century. No longer stuck on the image of a messenger still awaiting his response as Jack peppered the thing with messages of consolation and hope.

Multiple times. He was doomed to try to get in contact with jack multiple times. And though he did, Jack had made no indication of him ever escaping. Would he be trapped here for all of time? Or would multiple days pass, or weeks, or even months, with him sitting idly in this building, forced to reach only Jack within the outside world? Forced to live through nothing more than messages, never able to see him or ask him about his past or what had happened to him? Was this how he was going to spend the rest of existence?

Jack was immortal. Was this how Ianto would continue existing in his life? Would either of them be content with that?

His only comfort was the final message Jack had sent him, after acknowledging that Ianto’s silence was answer enough and trying to get Ianto to take hope. _You’re going to find your way through this._ He hoped that meant he found a way out of this place, back to the land of the living. What good was living forever if he was trapped here, doing nothing? _Being_ nothing? He would lose his mind.

The numbers stopped. It happened suddenly, between one blink and the next. He leaned toward the keyboard. He wasn’t the only one. Crimped called out the changed date – October 18, 2597 – and everyone started clacking away on the computers. To them, since they didn’t really remember any time period, one century was as good as the next. He wondered if he would feel the same, after he spent enough time here.

The monitor was still old and worn, and the Internet took absolute ages to start up. But once it did, it looked even more blinding than before. Pop-up ads blocked out the entire screen, and he had to avert his gaze from a couple that showed gifs – no, those looked like they were supposed to be holograms – from porn sites. Very carefully, he booted up the old Torchwood software. It looked like it belonged in a museum compared to the Internet he saw now.

… _I’m here,_ he typed in, and waited, breath held. He wondered how many times he’d sent messages like this to Jack before. Jack, left to slide through time in a linear fashion, while he bumped and bucked along its stream.

Jack could be doing anything. He could be fighting some intergalactic battle. Sleeping. Fucking. He closed his eyes. If he’d been in his own time period – if he was still alive, had still been alive – by now, he would have been long dead. From what he could see from the dates he’d viewed thus far, centuries might pass before he got in contact with Jack. Was it right to tie him down to someone who was so far gone from his never-ending life? Was it right to constantly pull Jack back to the twenty-first century, even though everyone in it was long gone to him? Worse, would he come across a time when so many centuries had passed, Jack no longer remembered him?

His heart sped up in his chest. His hands shook. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want to see that.

_Good evening, Ianto._

The man didn’t ask if it was him. By this time, there was likely no other person it could be. He tried to type a response, only for the system to nearly crash. He winced as the loading signal took up the screen, bringing with it two dancing women who made the loading time even worse. The Internet must have become property of some corporation. A small button down at the bottom of the screen promised a twenty-four hour ad-free experience for only one hundred dollars.

He read Jack’s response again the moment the ads went away. Evening. It was evening. “It’s evening,” he said, feeling the need to tell somebody. Those next to him – Drive and the man who’d followed Injury – Cavendish – around – looked at him. Neither said anything. For them, it likely didn’t matter.

He responded.

_These ads are certainly… provocative._

God, he was an idiot.

 _Like them? They’ll get worse before they get better,_ Jack responded. He could almost hear the man’s voice. He was surprised by the stab of loneliness that hit him. He wanted Jack by his side. If Jack was here, things might not have been okay, but they would have been better.

_If they got any worse, the font would have to be zoomed in on._

_Who says that won’t be the case?_

He chuckled despite himself. All right. He was starting to see what he’d liked about the man. _So, what? What makes humanity decide it was tired of staring at gyrating butts?_

_An epileptic will win a lawsuit. It starts a spiral; gamblers, nymphos, epileptics, the deaf and blind._

_In other words, money._

_Humans don’t change all that much, for better and for worse._

The idea was comforting, oddly enough. He sat back for a moment, just letting the feelings inside him play themselves out. He couldn’t remember anything about Jack, save for the few pieces of information those few days lent him. He remembered only a bit more about himself. For a moment, he considered asking Jack. He hesitated, knowing there were other times he would speak to the man. He didn’t know what all he’d already said, so to speak.

No, that wasn’t why. He was terrified Jack didn’t remember himself.

He wanted to say goodbye properly, just in case. He didn’t know how. He’d already tried telling Jack he loved him, and it didn’t end well. He remembered Jack’s voice, momentarily harsh, as he ordered Ianto not to say it. _“Don’t.”_ That moment, more than any other, hurt the most. If nothing else, he’d wanted Jack to love him back. He’d thought Jack had – or at least, he thought he’d thought it. It was the only thing that explained the shock he recalled every time Jack had rebuffed him while the 456 attacked. If it had been in question, wouldn’t he have been hurt, but resigned? Or even just numb to it? If he was the type to hold on to an unrequited love?

He knew, in his heart, that Jack needed him. He didn’t know why he’d thought that, but he recognized the conviction behind it. Jack needed him, just as he needed Jack. But Jack didn’t love him. He couldn’t afford to love anyone, knowing he would lose them eventually.

The computer crashed again.

He restarted the system. As he looked around, he saw several others doing the same, even cursing under their breaths. Everyone seemed to have caught the frenetic energy he’d been showing, now that they had something to actually do. He caught Fragrant speaking with Elder, both of them poring over the folders from the first vault. He watched them for a while. Elder seemed to follow more what Fragrant was saying, though he did point at things and speak slowly to the woman. Each time he did, she listened intently, even clapped him on the shoulder. They seemed to get along well.

Finally, the system booted back up, and he saw he’d been inundated with messages from Jack, each asking him to respond. _I’m here,_ he sent again, then, _I don’t think it’s your system that’s going to give out first. This one keeps crashing._

It took some time before Jack responded. _Then this might be our last goodbye._

Ianto sucked in a breath. The idea made something rebel within him. It hit him, suddenly, that this wasn’t as bad as he was making it out to be. He’d thought, in those final moments, that he wouldn’t have a single one left with which to speak to Jack. To be there for him when he returned from the dead, to make him coffee or kiss him good morning or stand beside him when he made the hard choices the rest of the world was too afraid to make. He wanted to be there for the man when he was all alone in his immortality. With these messages, he had lived longer than any other of Jack’s lovers. Because of that, he might have the greatest chance of being remembered.

Jack may not have ever wanted Ianto to say he loved him, but there were far more ways to say he cared.

 _I don’t remember much of our time together, but I do remember how important it was to me._ He thought about it, then erased that. He had to wait another couple of minutes while the computer struggled to compensate for the new Internet compatibility. It at least gave him some time to think about what he should say. Finally, he settled with, _Every day I was with you – even during the hard times – I was happy. I don’t regret a moment._

Except, perhaps, the moment Jack had looked down at him and said, “don’t.” But Jack didn’t need to know that.

He absolutely _was_ the type to settle for an unrequited love, wasn’t he? Wonderful.

The computer crashed again.

He sighed.

Beside him, Drive cursed. “All right, new plan,” Drive said, his voice barely cutting through the noise. He grimaced. “New plan!” he said. His voice rose, only to turn hoarse. He cleared it several times. “Dammit,” he muttered.

“What’s the plan?” Ianto asked.

Drive looked at him. “Our computers can’t handle the strain of this Internet as it is. This many people on it? It’s bound to keep crashing.”

Ianto stood. “Everyone unessential to Fragrant’s plan – which means you,” he said, pointing to the man beside him known as Medical, “and you,” he said, pointing to Shape, then Sharp, the business-pants man, and pointing down the line a few more times, “along with me–” his gaze flickered to his screen, yet to recover from its own crash “–off the machines. We’re going to have to go with quality over quantity if we want anything getting out at all.”

Fragrant looked up from her conference with Elder. “Problem?”

“The computers can’t handle the 26th century’s Internet,” Ianto said.

“Then everyone, do as he says.” She turned back to Elder. “If you aren’t on a computer, come help us with these files.”

Ianto moved to do as told. Drive stopped him with a quick smack to his arm. He looked down, but Drive was facing the computers again and didn’t look at him. “Thanks.”

Ianto gave him a small smile, certain the man was watching his reflection off the monitor. “Of course.”

What he’d said to Jack, he couldn’t be certain of. His memories were too few in number to be sure they were true. But from what he remembered feeling as he’d fallen to the 456’s poison, he thought anything else might be far closer to a lie. His last thought had been of how much he loved Jack, and how fruitless such a feeling was. He hadn’t regretted it as he’d died. The chances of him regretting it while he’d lived were just too slim.

* * *

“The Rift is closed, but the energy emissions are still fluctuating a bit,” Gwen said, waving the readout as if he hadn’t been the one to hand it to her. “That might account for these sporadic posts. One in the 1990’s, several more in the 00’s and even in the past couple of years.”

“They’ve had plenty of time to try to get in contact with us. We just never knew they were doing it.” He scrubbed his face. They’d caught the first flight out to London and had bought a place in first class to give them room to keep working. “All of those records were filed here, then wiped. There was a bit of a scare when a building just up and disappeared in the middle of Sheffield. We had to keep the news about Torchwood quiet.”

“You never thought it might be coming from the members of Torchwood themselves?”

“They were mostly about the building, if you’ll notice. We figured they would have sense enough to use a bit more information than that.”

“All right, I’ll give you that.” Gwen scrolled through the files cataloged in the old Torchwood system on Ianto’s old phone. There were quite a few; most had, as Jack had said, done little more than described the building and asked where it had gone or what had happened to it, or if people knew what the building was. A few listed personnel’s physical appearances and asked their whereabouts. Very few named Torchwood itself, and only one – one that had been so suspicious as to be flagged – that had included an old story about something that could have been someone explaining the Rift. “So what does all of this even mean?”

“It means we’ve got a lot of junk to look through.” Gwen huffed at that. “Any news from Andy?”

“Oh. He says if we don’t do something about Norton, he’ll be forced to kill him.”

“If he succeeds, he can officially join Torchwood.” He grinned at the sharp look Gwen gave him. “All right, all right. He’s already one of us.”

“And we’re not going to try to kill Norton.”

“Not like we could, the wily bastard.” He ignored the look this time and tapped on the phone. “Time to get started.”

Gwen sighed again.

* * *

“I think I actually have something,” Gwen said after over two hours of sifting through old blog posts, message boards, and even entire web pages. She leaned forward, blinking bleary eyes at the text in front of her. She felt Jack’s presence lean in beside her and continued. “It’s some old report about the house, still, but it adds in a couple of names and notes that there’s a ‘temporal disturbance’ around the building. Says it’s ‘outplaced.’ It’s either a lead or a crackpot, just like the countless other stories on here.”

“Let’s file that one under ‘maybe,’ then,” Jack said, and she did as ordered. Everything they had was old website save files or old pictures of the messages. The files were slowly being moved into folders labeled ‘Useless,’ ‘Maybe Useful,’ and ‘Definitely Useful.’ The latter was empty. She slid the site file into ‘Maybe Useful,’ bringing that folder’s count up to two, including the odd rumor that someone had written onto ZDNet about space and time coalescing into something they now knew as the Rift.

She sighed and put the phone down on her lap, rubbing her eyes. “What exactly happened to Torchwood Four, anyway?”

“It got lost.”

“A building doesn’t make a run for groceries and fail to come back,” Gwen said, giving Jack a warning look. “How about a real explanation?”

He sighed. Beside her, he’d been compiling an odd set of notes and taking readings on God knew what. His back was hunched. He rubbed down his face with his hands, looking, for an instant, more tired than she’d seen him in months. He was always like this around this time. No matter how he pretended, Jack wasn’t finding it easy to bounce back from losing Ianto. “All we really know is that the Red Key is involved. It’s an old artifact. First got a look at it when Alex, the old Torchwood Three leader, saw some future it showed him and decide to kill his entire staff.”

Gwen jumped a bit in her seat. “So they’re all dead? What about everyone at Torchwood Four? How is that possible?”

“No, that’s not it.” He held up his hand. She saw lines beneath his eyes. He hadn’t been sleeping. “The Red Key doesn’t show the future or make you kill people. Not exactly. It brings bad luck to whoever holds it. For whatever reason, despite trying to get rid of it, the thing landed in Torchwood Four. Shortly thereafter, the entire building disappeared. Along with everyone inside.”

“And you think this ‘Red Key’ is responsible.” She looked again at the myriad of files pooled under ‘Torchwood Four’ in the ‘Unsolved Cases’ portion of their old system. She was surprised it had survived; Jack had blamed Ianto, saying the man must have considered those files more important than their solved reports or information on the Rift. It sounded like Ianto to have thought ahead to what he saved on his phone.

“Well, as you said,” Jack said, responding to her remark on the Red Key, “it’s not like a building to just get up and walk off.”

“But they might have found something else. Some other artifact, or something?”

“No. They were busy checking out a part of a spaceship that had recently crashed. I’d already been called in for it; it had just been the usual packaging transporter. Nothing new or weird or creepy on-board. They’d hoped to salvage some of the tech, but there wasn’t anything there that would have made the building move. Not normally.”

“They’re moving through time, then, and almost certainly in the Rift. Why are we not searching for a way to get them out?”

“Without understanding how they got in?” Jack shook his head. “And don’t forget: the Rift is closed. We can’t use it as a means to get them out. Not anymore. It’s like shouting between two walls. We may be able to hear them, but that doesn’t mean we can reach them.”

Gwen scowled. “So, what? We’re to leave them stranded forever?”

“No.” He pointed to the newly updated ‘Maybe Useful’ folder. “We use these to see where they are and if there’s a doorway that connects them to something else. Then hopefully, we’ll find another passageway that will lead us to them.”

“Like a hallway with two doors,” Gwen said, starting to understand. “But wait. There isn’t anything that could link us to them like that, is there?”

“Actually, I’ve already thought of something.”

“Then why aren’t we doing that instead of burning our eyes on telephone screens and notebook paper?”

Jack leaned back into his chair, picking up his notes once more. “Because we don’t know if that hallway is going to kill us.”

She cleared her throat. “Hence why we’re searching for clues on their whereabouts now.”

“Hence why we’re searching for clues on their whereabouts now,” Jack echoed with a nod. She sighed. She hated it when Jack was right, and he always was. Fine. She got back to work.

* * *

Ianto ended up playing errand boy to the others as folder after folder was picked up and dissected. Notes were made – on missions, on reports, on hints as to who could be who. He was suddenly the outsider to their coordination instead of acting as their motivator. These people, with so much endless time on their hands, had suddenly come alive again. Perhaps this was how they’d learned to live. Perhaps he was the one who needed to take notes.

He checked his watch of couple of times, but eventually, he remembered that it was futile and stopped, though he had to remind himself often. A few of these people may wear watches, but he never saw them check the things. They’d learned long ago that time was a false construct in this place. It left him feeling antsy, a bit disoriented. He’d never lived – not that he could recall – in a place where time simply didn’t exist. Where there was no rumble of the stomach to speak of skipped meals or heavy eyelids to warn of an approaching bedtime. He felt almost like he was floating, some lost bit of flotsam drifting through time and space.

From time to time, he peeked at the folders and tried to find any sort of hint that might explain why he’d ended up in this place. So far, all he had learned was that Torchwood Four had been more of a research station than a battle station like Torchwood Three, and that its inhabitants were slave drivers when they had their eyes on a prize.

He was in the middle of yet another run when he heard a call go up among those still sitting in front of the computers. “Time’s off!”

The people each seemed to scoot back in their chairs as one, save for Drive, whose gaze had yet to leave the screen. Ianto was understanding the need for the glasses.

Injury – Cavendish – rolled her wrists. “That was too much typing,” she said.

“Hopefully it did something,” Crimped said. She rolled her shoulders and leaned her head back, eyes closed. “Maybe we’ll get out of here yet.” She opened one eye to peer at Ianto. “I meant to ask. Wouldn’t you be one of the necessary people on the computer? Even more important than Drive?”

“Thanks, Crimped,” the black-haired man spoke up, adjusting his glasses but otherwise not pausing in his typing, even though the Internet was down. Ianto walked over and caught the man updating a Word file of some sort.

“Well?” the woman asked, ignoring Drive’s response.

“I’d already left messages,” he said, hedging a bit. “That time period is far beyond my own. The chances of someone being able to figure out who I am are slim. My time would be better served here.”

His answer seem to bring down the mood in the room. He _had_ just finished saying that all their effort probably wouldn’t amount to anything. It wasn’t how he’d meant it to sound, but there was little he could do about it now. The more interesting thing to him, he thought as he carried the latest horde of folders up to the group clustered around Elder’s desk, was why he felt unwilling to speak of Jack’s immortality. From what he could remember, it wasn’t as if it had been some sort of secret. At least not to the members of Torchwood. So why?

It was like… instinct. Or an old habit. He remembered hiding Jack’s immortality from Clement McDonald, but he wasn’t sure why. It had been a natural response. Which meant it likely stemmed from previous information. Previous memories.

He had little that he could trust. He decided trusting himself, even his old self that he couldn’t remember, was the first logical choice. Even if he seemed the type to love someone who clearly didn’t love him back.

“Oh!” Lounge said, snapping to attention. He’d been lying on his side on the floor. Everyone turned to look at him. “Check it out. This thing says we needed one Miss Carmen Raye to speak to the spirit locked in some weird alien device, since it would only speak to those of similar African descent. Congrats, Crimped! Your name’s Carmen Raye!”

A cheer went up from the people around him. Ianto slunk back as people pressed forward to give Crimped – Carmen, now – congratulations. She beamed fit to split her face and immediately tested the name out.

He slipped away. Until the computers settled on a viable time once more, he had better things to do than stand on the outside looking in.


	6. Chapter Six

Over the course of what felt like days, Ianto sent messages back and forth between himself and Jack every time the computers’ date froze. The first had been useless; while he actually found Jack, the man hadn’t known who Ianto was. Which meant Jack hadn’t known him in 1992. Which made sense, he supposed, since he thought he was younger than thirty. Which meant he’d likely been in middle school during that year.

The rest had been… well. Interesting wasn’t the right word. The conversations had been careful, several of them peppered with warnings from Jack that he couldn’t say anything without altering time. Most conversations said nothing at all, yet every time, Ianto came out of them more relaxed and resolute than before.

He left detailed reports on the building, a few of the files they’d found, and finally, thinking about it, about himself. Once they started getting years that matched around when he’d died – 2002, 2013, 2025 – he started leaving blog posts and Facebook pages and even tweets talking about himself, Torchwood Four, and once mentioning the 456. He tried to contact the messaging system, as well, but it didn’t exist in 2002, and in 2013, his texts received no answer.

2013 did give him one thing, however: another access point into Torchwood. All this time, he’d been using Torchwood Four’s password to log into an archaic chat room, so to speak, not unlike the old AOL rooms. All he had to do to get in was click on the desktop icon and type in the password. But in 2013, he found that the chat room sat oddly empty. He’d tried to look up more information with Torchwood Four’s old password, then, sitting for what felt like several hours, had tried a few passwords that had randomly entered his head. They were all stupid, obvious words – but one of them had worked. He’d typed it in and then – voila! Like magic, the computer had opened up to a new span of files. Ones that looked familiar yet alien at the same time.

In there, along with so many things he’d needed two more date changes to search through it all, had been another ‘chat room.’ A private one.

He checked the date again. 2014, some time in September. It was close enough to when he’d died. He hadn’t lost his chance. Even though he’d been on the wrong chat room all this time – which was strange; he’d been communicating with Jack through that thing for probably days – he still had the chance, and hadn’t lost days of time to get it.

After so long sending out messages into the void, leaving information that got deleted every time he and the others in the building tried to find their links again, _finally_ , he could send a note into this used chat room (though it seemed used more for flirting than for anything else) and potentially be heard. By a Torchwood member. Perhaps even by _Jack_.

But he needed it to be something big. Something provocative. This chat room hadn’t seen use in years; the last known conversation had been between two people who had _definitely_ been flirting instead of exchanging information. What could he say or do that would garner the amount of attention needed to get two people fed up with flirting online to check their old Torchwood chat?

No. He already knew. During one of his many conversations with Jack, he’d asked what he was supposed to do if he couldn’t get Jack to speak on what was happening. _I guess this is going to be another time when we don’t talk about anything to do with me getting out of here,_ he’d typed, fed up with not getting any help or answers and starting to wonder what he’d ever seen in the man.

 _It’s not the right time,_ Jack had replied.

_When will be?_

_You’ll know it when you see it. Just start yelling at me about Torchwood Four. It’s bound to get a weird reaction sooner or later, right?_

It had been the best Jack could give, apparently, but it was perfect now. A provocative enough note to get Torchwood’s hanky-panky couple back to work. _Well, I found Torchwood Four for you,_ he wrote. _That’s the good news. Interested in the bad news?_

He hadn’t really expected an answer. Certainly not so quickly. He’d barely started scrolling up, curiosity getting the better of him, before the new notification alert flashed. He scrolled right back down and lifted a single brow.

_Once I find you, you are going to wish you never tried to impersonate him._

“Okay,” he said, with the tone of voice that said he was questioning the person’s sanity. It wasn’t quite the reaction he’d been expecting. Whoever this person was, they were prickly. Well. Maybe anger would motivate them.

_Okay. Feel free. Here’s a hint: I’m in Torchwood Four._

He sat back. No response. Maybe they were already looking for him? He huffed quietly to himself. Was this some sort of private messaging system? Not for Torchwood, but for just the two lovebirds? He started scrolling up again, wondering exactly what it was he’d hacked into. The time stamps told him the last conversations had been years ago. Nearly exactly, in fact; the last had been less than a week previously, in 2009. He’d thought the couple had drifted apart, but maybe the answer wasn’t as mellow as that. After all, there was no sign of real animosity between the two messengers, despite the petty squabbles now and again. From what he could see, it was an ongoing liaison between two men. One referred to as ‘sir,’ the other noted to be wearing a tie on one occasion. Then he scrolled up enough to find a name, and he sucked in a breath.

_Don’t think I’m happy with you, Ianto Jones._

It wasn’t just any two people whose messages he’d stumbled upon. It was his. His and, if the memories he still carried were any indication, Jack’s.

“Holy shit,” he said.

* * *

They had barely stepped off the airplane before Jack was running for the remade Hub. Gwen had struggled to keep up, not just with his long strides, but with his quickened speech. “Gwen, grab Andy and have him shake off Norton if you can. I’m gonna need both of you to check out the Rift and the notes we’ve kept on Torchwood Four. I’m going to grab Tosh’s scanner and check out the Rift itself, see if there’s anything I can pick up.”

She nodded, stumbling for a second over his use of ‘Tosh’s scanner.’ In truth, Tosh’s scanner had been destroyed when the bomb had gone off. This was a new one, remade from Tosh’s old notes. But he didn’t call it the Rift scanner. To him, it would always be Tosh’s. Perhaps it was his way of remembering her. “What do you expect to find?”

“Nothing. Something. I don’t know.” His trenchcoat flapped out behind him as he nearly raced down the streets. People were forced to jump away or collide with him. “The Rift was supposed to be closed forever. Yes, there’s enough residual energy for something to leak out – just enough for the Doctor to still stop off for a pit stop once in a blue moon. But not enough for messages to seep through. And from Torchwood Four, of all places!”

She skipped madly to keep up. It was like playing with her daughter in the park. She’d thought she’d be able to take over for Rhys when she got back, but if Jack kept her going at this pace, Rhys would be made permanent Mr. Mom before she could recover. “You said you and the rest of Torchwood never put together that they were getting messages from the people at Torchwood Four. How? Weren’t you looking for them?”

“We were,” he said, “but not because of that. We never really expected to hear from them again.” He looked back behind him, caught the frustrated look on her face, and finally slowed down enough that she only had to half-jog to keep up. “Sorry. Torchwood Four broke away from the rest of Torchwood. At first, we thought it because they wanted to focus on their research. But then we started getting news of weird things. Disappearances in Sheffield, far more than there should have been. Reports of bodies dissected. Organs missing. Blood on the streets. We tried to get in touch with Torchwood Four, but by then it was too late.” He stopped moving, so quickly Gwen bumped into his back. She rubbed her nose as Jack clenched his fists. “It was the Red Key.” He shook his head. “They all went mad, Gwen. Every single one of them. Torchwood sent agents out to contain them, but before they arrived, the entire building and everyone in it had just… vanished.”

Gwen covered her mouth. “Why?” she asked. “Why did they all go crazy? You said the Red Key brought bad luck!”

“It does. It brings out something in people. I don’t know. But it always leads to death.” He turned to Gwen. “I tried to get rid of it from Torchwood Three once, but the thing – it’s like it has a mind of its own. I doubt it can be contained by anyone.”

“Like the One Ring,” Gwen said, and he blinked.

“Did you just make a fantasy novel reference?”

She scowled. “I watch movies, thank you.” She flounced her hair and hurried forward, setting her own pace this time. Jack fell into step beside her. “So they went crazy and disappeared, and you thought that was the last of them.”

“Honestly, we thought they were all dead. Killed by each other, if not by whatever had made them pop off from the middle of Sheffield in the first place. We wanted to find them, but it wasn’t high on our list of priorities. Not as much as finding the Red Key and containing it.”

“So now we have people who are sending messages through the Internet from the Rift, and the reason they’re there is because of the Red Key.” She stared straight ahead. “So how exactly are we going to go about getting them out? As you said, the Rift’s closed. Wherever they are, they may very well still be under the influence of the Red Key. And we don’t even know who’s sending these messages, or if they’re anything other than a trap.”

“You’re seeing the problem.”

“I’m seeing several problems!” She glared at him. “Why are we doing all this, then? Why are we trying to get these people out?”

“The last time Torchwood tried to get in touch with them, they received little more than garbled messages and promises to ‘make it go away.’ Now we have someone breaking into mine and Ianto’s private messaging system and sending full sentences telling us where they are. And,” he said, and Gwen found him pushing their pace faster again, “because one part of that first message doesn’t make any sense.”

She frowned. “What? What part?”

“The messenger said they’d _found_ Torchwood Four.” Gwen frowned for a second. Then her eyes widened. Jack caught it. His smile was grim. “That’s right. Whoever this person is, they’re not a part of Torchwood Four. One of ours is trapped in there with them.”

* * *

Ianto scrolled through conversation after conversation. Now that he knew it was himself and Jack talking, he took the time to really read them, to get to know how Jack spoke to him and he spoke to Jack. Some were obvious – whenever one called the other sir, he knew it was him speaking to Jack – but some were harder. He started seeing the way he spoke mimicked in the text, and was amazed at the… companionship he saw between the two of them. It was as if they were married. Every time one spoke to the other, there was an unspoken understanding between them.

And oh, the flirting. He hadn’t been wrong about that. It just seemed more obvious now that there was no way they’d parted on less than amicable terms. The very last back and forth was alarmingly domestic, the flirting so practiced by then it had become a form of endearment. He read it again and again and again, amazed that this was how he and Jack had been. The memories he held, during those scant five days, were very different from this.

Then again, the world had been ending. Children were about to be sacrificed. And of course, they’d been attacked over and over again. Perhaps those circumstances weren’t the ideal state to study a relationship. But still, he remembered little between them that had been like _this._

_That cute tushie hurt?_

_It’s fine, thank you._

_Then you’re just shifting back and forth to get my attention?_

_Shut up. It’s your turn tomorrow._

_Looking forward to it._

He wasn’t certain who was talking, but for some reason, he felt like the more flirty one had to be Jack. The few memories he had included the knowledge that Jack had been with several people before. He didn’t think he’d been a virgin before Jack – not that he could be sure – but Jack had been so… sexually open. It was probably him. Probably. Which meant the one promising to get back at the person ‘tomorrow’ had likely been him.

He could guess why there weren’t any messages after that. The 456 had arrived. The Hub had been destroyed. And, shortly thereafter, he had died.

This small square space in front of him was what he’d been looking for. Proof of what he must have fallen in love with. A friendly, ridiculous man who turned everything into an innuendo and hid fathoms of darkness within him. His armor was loud and tacky and outdated, but it hid something cracked nearly to shattering. He remembered holding the man as he’d gasped back to life, the way Jack had clung to him strong enough to break bone. He remembered Jack admitting to helping the 456 before, the look on his face as he’d waited for that admission to be the one that finally turned Ianto away from him.

“ _I’ve only scratched the surface, haven’t I.”_ Pushed away again and again and again, this was who he’d returned to. Not the man who snarled at him to not call them a couple, but the man who had been so turned on by his tie he’d pleaded Ianto to let him ruin it. The man who had said “don’t” had also said, in those same seconds, “don’t leave me.”

He closed his eyes and pushed away from the desk, his heart so full it felt like it was choking him.

Around him, the building of Torchwood Four was alive. Drive, of course, was still strapped to his chair in front of his computer screen, fingers typing away as he worked on sending out messages or searching up blueprints for Shape or whatever in the world he was up to this time. Shape was back to drawing out blueprints, Elder spoke with Miss Sun and Medical. The latter grabbed Miss Cavendish’s arm as she passed him. She glared hotly at him and tried to yank herself free. She nearly faceplanted. Only Medical’s hand on her arm kept her up. She scowled outright and started cursing him out.

Crimped walked through the room, talking in low tones with Fragrant. He grimaced. No. Crimped’s name was Carmen; Fragrant’s was Gail.

He made to stand, only for Elder to raise his voice. “Update, everyone. Medical’s real name is Mr. Emrys Gardner. That makes him one of the founding members of this Torchwood Four thing.” Elder smile up at Medical. “That makes it nearly everyone we’ve identified now. Fragr – ah, Ms. Laverne – has also compiled a new list of possible explanations of how we came to be here. The papers will be passed out to Notion and Lounge and Uncle.”

“Hey!” Notion shouted out. “Use our real names! We need to get used to them, right?”

Elder cleared his throat. “Ah, right. Sorry.” Ianto carefully lined up the new names with the faces he’d come to know as he stood. He’d drifted further and further from these people as he’d hunted down his own mysteries. Now he looked around and saw only strangers where before he’d begun to know everyone. He sighed and stretched, despite the fact that he didn’t feel sore at all.

He tuned back in as Elder said, “Fragrant is going to open up the vaults in the second room today. Crimped – ah, Carmen – if you would accompany her?” Elder seemed to notice Ianto’s attention for the first time and smiled. “How are you doing on your end, Mr. Jones?”

He nodded. “I’ve gotten a response from Torchwood.”

That got everyone’s attention. Drive even looked away from his screen. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Drive demanded.

“So far, the only response I’ve gotten is a promise to make me pay for impersonating someone. I told the person that I was in Torchwood Four, but I didn’t get a response.” He looked down at the computer screen. “And now it’s too late for them to give me one.”

He realized suddenly that, if that was his and Jack’s personal messaging system, then that meant the person who’d responded to him was Jack. Who thought Ianto was impersonating… Ianto. Wonderful.

“Still!” Elder said, leaning forward and clapping his hands. “This is wonderful news. A solid interaction with someone outside of this building, and they now know where to look for us. And someone from Torchwood! If ever we had a chance of finding someone who knew how to help, it would likely be them.” Elder stood from his chair as those around the room burst into approving murmurs. Carmen clapped. “You’ve done us a great service, Mr. Jones. Thank you for your hard work.”

He gave the man a thin-lipped grin. He wasn’t doing it for them, but he wouldn’t argue with results that benefited everybody.

Someone clapped him on the shoulder. He nearly splattered into the desk in front of him. “Way to go, son!” The man talking to him was one he’d never really spoken to before; he’d seen the guy around, had heard everyone speaking to each other enough to know the man’s chosen name; he was one of only three who didn’t yet know their real names, along with Lounge and Elder. Though this man was obviously Asian, there had apparently been an entire Torchwood base in India, and several men from the base had been liaisons with Torchwood Four, so his name was still up in the air. For now, he was still known as Uncle.

“It’s nothing.” He straightened his suit.

“Are you kidding? You’re our good luck charm.” The man chuckled and rubbed his nose. “You show up, and suddenly we’re getting the vaults open and learning our names and even contacting the outside world.”

“I had nothing to do with the vaults,” he said. “That was Ms. Laverne.” Who, oddly enough, hadn’t been put back in her original position of authority. He supposed finding out about one’s past didn’t change a person – or a group – back to how they’d been.

Which begged the question of whether he would still love Jack if he saw him again.

He cleared his throat. That wasn’t something to think about. First, get out. Then worry about the rest of it.

“I’m going to take a walk before the date changes again,” he said, and headed off.

“Sure! Thanks!” He didn’t look back at Uncle. He just kept walking. The others had their work to do, things to keep them occupied. He needed to clear his head.

Even though he didn’t feel any fatigue or burning in his eyes, still he thought he’d been sitting in front of the computer for too long. Maybe it was an old habit from when he’d been alive. Or not trapped in time. Whichever. In either case, he felt the need to escape the hustle and bustle of the crowd and be alone. He didn’t remember there being so many people in Torchwood Cardiff. Just him and Jack and Gwen. Was research more important than containing the Rift? Or had there been other moments like that explosion, where everything turned around in an instant and people they’d once had on their team had died?

That one seemed more likely, considering what had happened to him.

He moved down one of the side hallways, until he was standing in the room with the broken hull of a spaceship. He looked up at the thing, suspended eerily in the middle of the room. The metal was dark, an almost slate gray, but shinier than anything should have been. Glossy. He moved toward it, careful not to trigger anything. It looked dormant, but he couldn’t really tell. There were no lights on on the switchboards. Still, he wasn’t going to test it.

He wondered how the thing had come to be in Torchwood Four’s possession. How had it been transported to them for research? Boat? Truck? Perhaps there were records of it among all those files. Not that it mattered any more than the other alien paraphernalia around the room. He had a feeling the smaller objects were the more dangerous ones.

Once again, he searched through the scant remains of his memory. Nothing within them contained a clue about this place, or Torchwood Four, or any of the objects in the room. He took his time looking at them all, but a closer study yielded him nothing. He’d have an easier time looking for the notes on them in one of the vaults.

Which left him with what? Waiting idly, twiddling his thumbs, hoping the messages he sent into the ether brought someone to his rescue? He stared up at the broken spaceship, lips thin. The chances of that happening are slim. Even Jack couldn’t work miracles. Even Jack, when standing up against monsters, could lose the battle.

He took a deep breath. No. It was time to find something else.

A scream rent the air. He swiveled around. That had been Carmen. He ran through the hallway, only to stop as Carmen screamed again. Gail Laverne said something, clearly trying to calm the girl, but her voice shook, as well. He turned into the room – the second door down the hall from the Office. Behind him, he could hear the sounds of running footsteps.

Carmen turned to run out of the room, face covered by her hands, only to slam into Ianto’s chest. Instead of pulling away, she buried her head into his suit. He heard her crying.

He looked up. They’d only just opened the first vault in this room. Unlike the previous vault, however, files didn’t line the shelves. Instead there was jar after jar filled with oddly preserved organs. They hadn’t been preserved cleanly; blood caked the door and shelves both, dripped down to the bottom of the vault. He frowned. Unless alien tech was involved, the only reason those organs could look so well-preserved was if they’d been newly collected before Torchwood Four had relocated itself to this timeless plane.

Gail’s lips were so thin they nearly disappeared. “It seems we were up to something not very good,” she said. Ianto’s insides turned to ice.

He was trapped here with these people.


	7. Chapter Seven

Despite having been sort of shunted to the side when it came to the notes, suddenly Ianto was left primarily in charge of them. All it had taken was his blasé attitude toward the organs and blood, and suddenly everyone was turning to him. The people he’d managed to separate himself from, the people who had apparently been collecting body parts and putting them into vaults, had placed him in charge and now came to him for answers.

Carmen became his go-to liaison, running back and forth, giving instructions to the people around him, telling them how to preserve the blood and then how to clean it. He left specific orders to not move the organs around in any way; there may be some sort of pattern to their layout, and if not, then they could potentially find one. After that came blood tests, organ analysis. Were the organs cancerous? Alien? Anomalous in some way that indicated they’d been tampered with? Were they the same blood type? From people of the same ethnicity? Background? Age?

As for himself, he dug into the files. Forgoing his conversations with Jack, he focused on creating a timeline of sorts. The oldest files stretched back into the late 1800’s, with pages yellowed with age and script far more elegant than the newer handwritten reports. The newest carried on into the early nineties, which explained the very old looking computers.

Once again, time moved of its own accord, leaving him drifting within it. Disturbingly, he didn’t really seem to notice until he looked up. A couple of people were making lists of their own beside him. Shape, who had, by the look of things, chosen to document every organ and its exact place in each vault, even drawing up little diagrams, and Notion, who seemed to be listing out conspiracy theories and the list of evidence for each. Ianto read the one he was working on then – ‘We Are Organ Harvesting Cannibals’ and shook his head. “Would be more fridges, I’d think,” he said. Notion jumped. His pen scraped along the paper. He looked up at Ianto with his jaw dropped.

“Oh! You’re back with us! Learn anything?”

He frowned. He hadn’t been so out of it that he hadn’t been listening to the others move around. He had no intention of letting down his guard around these people. Certainly those who had been responsible for that vault of the Rue Morgue had forgotten their past, but that didn’t mean that part of their psyche was lost. He’d been careful to keep all of them at a distance, far enough away that he could fight back if they attacked him, and listened to make sure where they went. He had never not been ‘with them.’

“This Torchwood was founded around the turn of the twentieth century and was located in Sheffield – in Great Britain.”

Notion leaned over him. Ianto tensed. “Whoa. Where’d you get that?”

Ianto pointed at the symbols on the files. The oldest had two – one that looked familiar, from his days at the Hub, and one he’d never seen before. It had been that which had drawn him to them, and it was there he’d found the information on the founding of this specific Torchwood, the building, and its people. “It was the research section of the Torchwood Institute, created after several unknown events and artifacts were found by other branches. They recruited the brightest minds from multiple branches to spearhead this one, including Miss Laverne.” He nodded to Fragrant, who was going around checking on others’ progress at the moment. Notion stood up and waved to her.

“Hey, Gail! Ianto found something!”

Ianto closed his eyes and willed for patience. When he opened them again, every eye in the room was locked on him. He wondered if it wasn’t too late to strangle the man.

Of course, Notion’s announcement got everyone moving; Gail Laverne swerved around the desks to get to him; behind her, like ducklings, the others followed.

He took a steadying breath and told himself once again that it was wise to make himself valuable to these people. “I’ve only really started putting together a timeline. Here’s the start of this branch – Torchwood Four, based in Sheffield.” He handed the first file to Gail. “They used to have a lot of shipments coming and going through the city during the boom of the steel industry, and they used that to smuggle their finds in and out.”

Gail started reading over the file, even though it didn’t have the information he’d just spoken of within it. Several people leaned over her shoulder. Crimped – Carmen – came to read Ianto’s list over his shoulder. He worked to remain unaffected, at least on the surface. “The spread of available steel and subsequent decline of Sheffield’s own output back in the eighties made it a little harder, but they’d managed to maintain shipments by pretending the old building was undergoing renovations,” he said, continuing after a moment. He handed over another file to Gail. Carmen put her hand on his shoulder to better balance herself as she leaned down to read. “It became the usual ‘when are they going to actually finish that’ scenario until – well, until it disappeared, I suppose. People probably assumed the renovation had failed and the building had needed to be torn down. No other reason for there to be no record of a building popping away overnight, is there?”

“And us?” Carmen asked, even as she read down the list. Her face was scrunched – she likely couldn’t read shorthand. Good. He’d been counting on that.

“There’s little information that you all haven’t already found,” he said. “The only extra information I’ve found is your medical history. Most were checked over by Medical – Mr. Gardner,” he said, nodding to the man as he took a piece of paper from Gail and scanned it. “Though I think he’s already done tests on you, hasn’t he? That’s how you found out who Mr. Joram is out of all the Indian visitors.” He couldn’t point to Uncle at the moment, but he looked back toward the vaults to indicate he knew of whom he spoke.

Carmen gave up reading and looked at him. “I didn’t think you were listening to all that.”

It had been during his multiple conversations with Jack and, after that, reading up on their conversations from when he’d been alive, that they’d discovered most everyone’s names. He certainly would have seemed distracted. He _had_ been. But somehow, listening to other conversations and reacting quickly and accordingly had been like second nature to him. He’d done it before. Just as he’d searched through endless piles of data before. He tried once again to think back on who he’d been in Torchwood, but from what he remembered, he had been simply everything Jack had needed him to be. He went out on the field. He fought. He went on rescue missions. He worked the computers. He helped with gathering information – probably. He… cooked? And stole things like a pro?

“I was half-listening,” he said, minimizing his skills. “I wanted to know your names, since they’re important to all of you. Like yours.” He gave her a small smile. “Carmen Raye, right?”

She beamed, leaned down, and hugged him. He used every once of self-control to keep himself from tensing up. “Yeah,” she said, burying her face in his back for a second. He grabbed another file to hide how his fists clenched. She leaned back up and cleared her throat. “Was there anything different in those tests than what Med – ah, Emrys – has already found?”

He shrugged. It nudged her enough to reposition herself, but she didn’t let go of him. “They look normal, at least for the first several years. Then the days go off – it used to be the same two dates every year, one in winter and the other in summer – and then they start going to two in a single month, then no less than three.” He showed the notes he’d made on the dates and gestured to one of the separate files he’d created. Gail came around for a look, herself. He grimaced and simply handed his notes to the two women. “Most of these were done by other colleagues, or by the subjects themselves, though they were all recorded in their files, as normal.”

“That’s odd,” Carmen muttered, her nose half buried in the paper before Gail plucked it out of her hands. She moved to the files, but Emrys was already flipping through them.

He nodded, agreeing with her statement. “So many different people checking each patient – it was like no one trusted the readings of another. Even, perhaps, of themselves.” Which, as those documents had been made around the early 1990’s, could very well be linked somehow with whatever had made these people show up here in the white void. “Perhaps everyone was looking for a virus, or had one that made them do this.”

“Maybe,” Notion said, “we’re all nutjobs who wanted to enhance ourselves or something.”

Well. At least he wasn’t the one who said it.

“How could taking other peoples’ organs enhance us? Isn’t that for robotics only?” Carmen asked.

Notion chuckled. “You read too much sci-fi.”

“I don’t want to hear that from _you_ _!”_

Ianto listened to their bickering with only half an ear. As much as Notion’s ideas more often seemed to be on the deep end, this one settled something deep within him. He stood up. “Have we checked those organs?”

Carmen looked up at him, argument momentarily forgotten. “Yeah. Unc – ah, Ahim Joram – and Sharp – uh, what was his name?”

“Lloyd Harrow,” Ianto supplied, already moving.

“Yeah. They were going through them, giving Emrys a break – hey!” She ran to catch up with him. Gail, from behind them, gave orders to divvy up Ianto’s findings. “What is it?”

“The one thing that’s been bothering me since the moment I arrived here,” he said, and turned to face her, never slowing his pace. “I’m supposed to be dead.”

She blanched. “Then…”

His lips thinned. “I still don’t think I’m the only one.”

* * *

He avoided the newly renovated Hub after that first hour within its walls. Every time he turned around, there was something else that reminded him of Ianto. His office had been a no-go since before he’d even returned; the empty nook where Ianto’s coffee had sat had been another. But he’d been surprised how many more had needed to be banned – the computer monitors, where Ianto had picked up where brilliant Tosh had left off. The conference room where the two of them had ended up nearly more often than Jack’s room beneath his office. The bloody body room, renovated but without many of its said bodies within, simply because he couldn’t forget the look on Ianto’s face when he’d made that comment about stopwatches, thus turning their one-night stand into a more friends-with-benefits relationship. Not to mention the Archives; the name alone made him remember Ianto squirreled away in its depths, cataloging everything for them. He doubted it looked nearly as immaculate now, after the bombing, as it had when Ianto had been in charge of it.

So he’d called Andy and Norton back, had handed them over to Gwen for a briefing, and headed to the Rift. Or, well. Where it would have been, had Ianto not closed it.

It really wasn’t there anymore; he’d known that already, since he’d come here once before, after… after. Still, he’d been smart enough to bring a scanner with him, just in case, but though it picked up highly elevated readings, it was clear they were nothing to what they’d been – the leftover air cooled by an air conditioner even after the machine had been turned off. Soon enough, this place would be back to normal again.

And whoever was trapped with Torchwood Four would be trapped with them forever.

He didn’t know whether the readings were falling at a linear or a more exponential rate. He hadn’t been here to pick up anything, and he certainly hadn’t stayed within the Hub long enough to study the recordings that had been started up again once the place had been rebuilt. Something that, at the time, he’d said was unnecessary. Lucky him his subordinates had always been brilliant. He should have known better, he supposed – the readings were still strong enough that, yes, there was more than enough Rift energy remaining to have messages sent across, perhaps even objects – but he hadn’t wanted to be involved anymore. The very idea of coming back had made him sick to his stomach. Almost as sick as being here now.

In the next few years, if that, this place would show no sign of the Rift. Alex had said that the twenty-first century would be when it would all change. Jack had known they’d been ready. He stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the unbroken universe. Maybe it meant something, that he’d been right.

The readings were certainly lower than they’d been the last time he’d checked. He frowned, wishing he had a reading from around the time he’d received that message. There would be one at the Hub. He turned on his headset. “Gwen?”

“We’re almost caught up, Jack, give us another half hour. I wanted to check on the Rift’s activities before meeting up with you.”

“As usual, Gwen, you amaze me. That’s what I’m contacting you for. I want you to take a look at the Rift’s readings during the time I received that text.”

“Sure thing. Andy, wait a tick, would you?”

“Oh, yes, by all means, answer Jack’s beck and call,” he heard Norton say. “Tell me, how is dear Jack? Still pining after the lost little coffee boy?”

“Oi!” Gwen snapped, a split second before Jack did the same. “Shut it, or I’ll destroy that stupid thing. You don’t get to talk about him.”

Jack grinned despite it all. Gwen was a wonder. The anger had an extra bit of bite to it, too, that meant she was thinking about Ianto, as well. It made him feel slightly better to know there were still people who mourned Ianto, too. Soon enough, it would be just him.

“All right. I got the date. What time?”

“Shortly after you left,” he answered, though he couldn’t say exactly when. What time it had been had not been the thing on his mind. “It should be time stamped. Hold on.” He opened the old messenger, careful to keep his gaze only on the newest exchange and not the preceding ones. He read out the time. “Got it?”

“Yup,” she said, her voice much softer than before. “Don’t think I needed you telling me the exact time, anyway. I can see it – a huge spike in the readings, almost like the Rift snapped open for a second.”

“That’s impossible,” he said, and Gwen hummed in agreement.

“Yup, that’s what I thought, so hold on. Just – one – second – there! More like something jumbled up the readings there. Something spiked the energy readings on their own. Like it was linked to the Rift’s energy, but wasn’t actually the Rift. Like something prising open an elevator door long enough to slip something through. Hold on, I’ll check what it could have been.”

Going on a hunch, he said, “see if it has anything to do with particle displacement.”

“Okay, oddly specific, but you got it.”

“Wow, look at that,” Norton said after several moments. His voice dripped with sarcasm. “Jack’s right. What a coincidence.”

“As if you don’t likely know, too,” Gwen said, then, “yeah, Jack, it’s some sort of displacement field. Seems to be trying to latch on to the Rift.”

“Only for it to fail when it has nothing to hold on to,” he said, nodding at the information. He hadn’t been certain, but he had hoped.

“Just looks like a bunch of squiggles to me,” Andy said, sounding put out. “What in the world are you people going off about, anyway?”

“For once, I’m nearly as in the dark as you,” Gwen said. “Jack? Want to clue us all in now?”

“Remember that shipment I told you about? The one with part of a spaceship?”

“Yes?” she said, the word more like a question.

“It was just a part of the ship. The way they transported themselves and their cargo – usually alien slaves, judging by their actions when they landed on Earth. Its whole deal is its ability to move something from one place to the next.”

“Like Star Trek!” Andy said.

“Not quite. Star Trek had something that pulled something’s molecules apart. Crazy dangerous; McCoy had every right to be afraid of that. No. This one _displaces_ an item. Bends space so that something from one corner of the galaxy could reach the other in a second. Like that subway train Rhys had to deal with once. It makes whatever the ship is transporting travel through space as if, say, a rift had been opened within it.”

Gwen made a sharp sound of understanding. “Oh! But wait, isn’t that also dangerous?”

“Not to the cargo,” Jack said, voice grim. “And that was how they got their money. That’s how I got involved, actually. The readings looked a bit like the Rift, and Torchwood Cardiff was alerted to their presence in the region.”

“And you think this thing is what’s linking Torchwood Four to the Rift,” Gwen said, pulling the conversation back to where it belonged. Back to what was important.

“Yeah. Only it doesn’t have anything to hold on to. So it’s just spinning out without a tether.”

“That would mean we can’t get it back without opening the Rift again, wouldn’t it?” Andy asked.

“An astute observation, Andy,” he said, genuinely pleased. “But not necessarily. We just need to find another bit of tech like the spaceship.”

“Oh, is that all?” Gwen said. He imagined her rolling her eyes. “And where do you propose we grab one of those? Nip down to the corner store?”

“Nope!” he said with a grin. “We’re gonna jury-rig one of our own.”

There was a long, pregnant beat of silence. Then, “You’re joking, right?”

“Nope!” he said again, with just as much enthusiasm as before. A bit of it was forced; standing there at the base of Ianto’s last great moment, it was impossible to feel pure happiness. But there was a promise of adventure, a chance to solve a long-standing mystery that had plagued him, and a chance to save a person’s life. All in all, this week could have been a lot worse. “We’ll need to grab some things from the Hub. Hopefully everything we need is still operable. Everything else can be picked up at a hardware store. You’d be amazed how far a vacuum tube will take you.” The silence was broken by an ungraceful snort. “What? You would.”

“Sounds like fun,” Norton said, and Jack was pretty sure that wasn’t sarcasm in that tone.

“Yup,” he said, going back to business, ignoring Norton. “Gwen, grab something to write with; I’m giving you a list. I need you to hunt for a few things. I’m going to see about getting everything else we’ll need.”

“Corner store?” Gwen asked again.

He thought about a few people he still knew around Cardiff who owed him a few favors. “Something like that.”

* * *

Ianto looked through the lists Ajim and Emrys had made of the contents of the second vault room, then ordered the opening of the third vaults. Surprisingly, the others did as he’d told; Carmen raced off to grab Gail while Emrys and Ajim helped run down the information Ianto was looking for. It was unnecessary; so far, they’d made lists by shelf and vault; Each vault had its own page, each shelf its own space on said page. Many of the organs had already been cataloged by blood type as well, with the unsurprising find that each vault held organs of the same blood type.

His heart rate sped up as he listened to Ajim list off the age of the tissues – varying everywhere from early twenties to deteriorated ages nearing the seventy marker – and cleared his throat. “Any chance you could find out what race they all came from?”

“Genetic markers like that are in the blood, yes,” Emrys said, his eyes narrowing as he spoke. He leaned up against a space in between the vaults, getting up every few moments to check his clothes to ensure he got nothing on him. “But that’s more a check for one’s genetic background. We would need something more, bones or skin, for that. Unless you want us to use some of the stuff here.” When Ianto raised a brow, the doctor continued. “This building has devices that can do a billion different things. Some of them have medical advancements beyond anything we’ve seen on the computers, even in the far later centuries. But it’s all…” he waved his hand toward the room with the piece of the spaceship. “We haven’t used them often.”

Erring on the side of caution. He nodded. “Still. I need it to verify something.” He looked down, then around. “Where exactly is your medical room? I haven’t seen it.”

Emrys shrugged. “If it was once a part of this building, we haven’t found it. We hypothesize that we only have part of the building here. Didn’t Shape tell you? We likely only have a piece of the place.”

Shape had indeed mentioned problems with pinpointing the building they were in or its measurements. “So we’re likely missing everything from the lab,” Ianto said.

“Yeah.”

He thought for a moment. Without the lab, they couldn’t double-check any of the original data about the bodies of the people here. He looked around, his mind spinning. “Is there a way to get a diagnosis of everyone here? Their blood types, their…”

Emrys shrugged. “We don’t have to. We have the information in the files.”

Ianto shook his head. He couldn’t remember much about anything – four (and some change) days were not enough to make him an expert on anything Torchwood, especially considering the fact that Torchwood had not been a major part of those five days after – after the explosion. It only made him an expert compared to these people. But he felt like his instincts were there for a reason. He held on to them as he replied. “No. We don’t know for certain if we are who we match in those files. The best way to be certain would be to get a new reading.”

Emrys’ brows drew low. Ajim stepped forward. “You mean we might not be who we think we are.”

“Blood records for you match,” Ianto said, but there must be more than that. We should double-check. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out something. Something that makes you different now than you were before, even if you _are_ the same person. Maybe we’ll learn if there’s anything this place has done to us, or any reason we’re all here.” He turned to Emrys. “Do me, too. Double-check everyone.”

Emrys’ lips thinned. “You have a theory, don’t you.”

Ianto turned away, toward the vaults, already scanning them. He picked up a few of the notes Emrys and Ajim had made and started matching them with the contents of the vaults. “I do,” he said finally. “But I’m hoping I’m wrong.”

* * *

Gwen raised both brows when he came charging back into the Hub. “Help me with all this, will you?” he asked. She jumped up from her seat before the computers and did as told, grabbing up the vacuum tubes and dragging them across the stone floor. Jack kept his gaze off of the office, the coffee nook, the hallway to the Archives, and headed straight for the medical center. He shivered as he passesd. Ghosts lived here. “Get all of this out of here; we’re gonna need the room. Keep it nearby, though; whoever’s in there, if they’re still alive, is likely going to need immediate attention.”

“You think they’ll be wounded?” Gwen asked.

“Or something.” His lips set into a thin line as he started placing his acquired items around the edges of the room. “Torchwood Four disappeared off the face of the earth. We’ve searched for it high and low, used every manner of scanner out there. Nothing. Until now.” He waved Gwen over and pointed to the far corner of the room. Gwen placed down her burden and moved over to the gurney, shouting for Andy to come help. “Who knows where they’ve been or what’s been happening to them. And this new person – whoever they are, they’ve shown up in that same impossible place.”

“Are you ever gonna tell us what happened with Torchwood Four?”

“Would if I could.”

She gave him a look.

“What? I would.” Silence, and he sighed. Andy came over just as she started shoving the gurney up the access ramp, and he pulled it away, the wheels running bumpily over the stone, causing the contents on top to clang as he retreated. Jack took the chance to face Gwen completely. “We don’t know much. I’ve already told you. They went mad because of the device and then just–” he snapped his fingers “–disappeared.”

“But why? To where? You must have gotten energy readings.”

He sighed again. “Hand me that miniature spacial circuit, would you?” Gwen gave him a blank look. He pointed to the right. “That thing.”

She followed the length of his arm to his pointer, then moved to grab a five-inch thick disc. “Miniature?” she said with a huff.

“Better than the not miniature ones, trust me.” He took the thing in one hand, gritting his teeth at the weight of it until he could put it down on top of the lead-lined cube he needed to seal it within. Even then, the energy readings would be strong; he would need to use the second and third, each sealed shut tight, to ensure they didn’t get blown into particulates. “UNIT had a few to spare, and I only need the one.” He waved her back to the right again. “Next is the – uh, the bronze cord.” Gwen grabbed it, and only after he had it in hand and was snaking its length from the third cube to the pad he was going to jury rig to get them to Torchwood Four did he answer Gwen’s question. “Yeah, we got readings.”

“And?”

Jack sat back and rubbed his forehead. He didn’t bother looking up, just continued working. “There had been a major surge of energy around where Torchwood Four had once stood. It sank into the old basement, had to be purged before it caused a meltdown. Look.” He looked up at her. “Whatever made the building disappear, it was huge, and it had to do with spacial displacement. We had to make a choice between getting them back or saving Sheffield. We chose to save Sheffield.”

Gwen paled. “That’s how you knew you would find them again? Because you knew they’d been, what? Displaced?”

“Yeah.” He waved her over to the other side of the room. Several minutes were spent silently passing things back and forth, Jack giving Gwen directions and her taking them. Andy eventually got involved, having finished preparing the medical supplies to Jack’s specifications. Norton chimed in with snarky remarks, helpful as always when it came to doing work.

“Okay, so. Alien transporter. Displacement. But it’s connected to the Rift.” Gwen listed it all out, only to tilt her head and look back up at him. “So how? How does that last one work?”

He shrugged. “The thing works by moving items through a spacial rift, like I said before. Hand me that wire. Thanks.” He hooked yet another wire to the outer cube. It was starting to look like Medusa’s head. “Who knows what the Red Key showed them. What it made them do. All I know is that they’re out there, somehow trying to connect to space, and they’re doing it through the Rift.”

“But shouldn’t they be able to just, I don’t know? Connect anywhere? Get some coordinates and zap themselves through?”

“In a perfect world, sure.” He waved her closer. “The vacuum tube isn’t quite long enough. We’re gonna have to move that closer.”

Gwen looked at the giant stepping pad they’d slowly built together. “You’re kidding.”

He shrugged again, grinned a little sideways. “Maybe we should have measured this out first.”

She gaped at him.

Andy needed to be called down for them to get the pad closer; it was huge, big enough for all of them to stand on, just barely, and almost three inches of connected wires, metal plating, and alien circuitry. When they finally finished, Jack told Gwen to switch out with Andy and start working on the software part of the installation. “Andy, we’re going to need to set up the screen. It goes up there.” Jack pointed to the ceiling.

Andy looked up. Put his hands on his hips. “Of course it does.”

Jack couldn’t help but grin. He was starting to like the kid. “Let’s get to work.”

“Jack?”

He turned to Gwen. She had barely started uploading the software onto their computers in order to download it into the machine once they got it set up and working. It would be through their own systems that they would enter the coordinates and send themselves to… to wherever Torchwood Four was. But at the moment, Gwen wasn’t looking at the screens. She was looking at him. “You say we’re going into something dangerous because of this. Because they went nuts. But is there another reason? If they’re trying to connect through the Rift, then doesn’t that mean that might be where they are? Like the hole’s closed up, but it’s still there. Isn’t that what this is? Us traveling into that closing hole of the Rift?”

Jack’s grin slipped away. “Yeah,” he said softly. “That’s basically it.”

Gwen’s eyes were wide. “And if it closes too much?”

“Yeah, Gwen,” he said. He heard her take a sudden breath. “We might not make it back.”


	8. Chapter Eight

Ianto leaned against the wall of the vaults, the space where Emrys had leaned just – what? Hours? Days? – before. They’d all run the tests Ianto had ordered. He saw several people milling about the entrance to the room, all of them seemingly lost. Of them all, the only one without the listless, almost panicked expression on their face was the one person still unnamed – Elder. The man went from person to person, touching a shoulder here and instigating a hug there. Carmen wept on him as he patted her back. Gail went and spoke quietly with him, only for him to hold the back of her head and lean forward until their foreheads touched.

He’d been right. These people had been catching replacements for themselves.

Same blood type, same genetic typesets, same age. A few showed aging unlike the rest – avid smoker, cancerous, so forth. Those had been put on the bottom shelves. The top shelves had been reserved for the best specimens – the ones healthiest. Ianto scrubbed his face.

But that hadn’t been all.

Finally, Emrys came to stand before him. Ianto didn’t bother looking at the man. The tension in the doctor’s shoulders had been growing more and more, worse and worse, as test after test was completed. “Even if I can’t understand why,” Emrys said, “I can at least get what we’ve done.”

Ianto cleared his throat. Then, still feeling like something was stuck in there, he did it again. “Wherever we are, it’s not Earth,” he said. “You were likely making sure you could all stay alive. Or, well. Something like that.”

“But we’re outside of time.” Emrys started, then stopped and shook his head. “That’s not the thing that gets me.”

Yeah. Ianto rubbed his lips with his finger. It wasn’t what got to him, either.

Emrys pushed on, getting closer, getting into his space. “We have a few others, ones that don’t match us, but Notion and Sharp have figured out matches through the old files. We were gathering for more than just those in here. But that one?” The man pointed to the second room, also filled to the brim with organs and body parts. “That one doesn’t match any of ours. It matches _you_.”

Ianto closed his eyes. “Yeah.”

“That’s madness, isn’t it? How could we know you would come here? Were you one of ours?”

Ianto shook his head. “No. I was with Torchwood Three.” Just in case the man had forgotten.

“But you’re here. _You’re in here.”_

He shuddered. “Yeah,” he said again.

Emrys closed in on him, so close Ianto could smell his breath, could nearly hear his heartbeat. If his heartbeat was even real. If _Ianto’s_ was even real. _“How?”_

Ianto shuddered. He could almost feel the weight of the organs in that room. They were still emblazoned in his mind. Each jar. Each body. Each life taken to ensure there was a back-up for him. In case he died. In case he was poisoned and fell in Jack’s arms.

“God help me, I don’t know.”

* * *

“There! Done.” Jack stood back until he brushed against the wall, admiring their handiwork. His grin slipped. He had to bite his lip. “Works better than it looks.”

“Well, that’s good, because it looks like a pile of junk.” Andy stepped back as well, looking the equipment up and down. There were more wires than there were stray parts, but only just. The screen, set up on the ceiling and squeaking slightly as the beams moved into position, at work thanks to Gwen’s software download, looked like a broken mess of solar panels and round saucers. The mismatch use of squares and circles made the thing look like half its parts were missing. They weren’t; the extra pieces had been back-ups in case they broke something or needed a second screen. Thankfully, the medical room was tony enough that the screen could make a sweep of the full room. The second screen hadn’t been needed, after all.

The standing plate, what they would be on when they used the transporter, was flat on the top, where it needed to be. After their bodies were scanned, the transporter would snap the space around them in a cylindrical shape, leaving them within the newly created rift’s folds. The thing might have looked like some shoddily made Star Trek landing pad, but in reality, it was where the rift would begin and end. Inside it, they would be transported into that Rift, across space, and land… well. So far, they didn’t have the place to land. They didn’t know where they were going. Jack needed a line to that spaceship. He needed to know where it was. Simple enough, with the algorithm they already had for the rift. They just needed to be able to find something with a similar signature, something that was latched onto Cardiff’s Rift.

Except the spaceship’s transporter needed to be tuned into their coordinates. And for that, he needed to manage to get in touch with the person on the other side. Somehow.

“So what now? What’s the next step?” Gwen looked over their work. She didn’t have quite the look of distrust that Andy did, but her gaze went over the jagged piece of the landing pad – the part they _wouldn’t_ be stepping on – and the three-time leaded cube sitting far in the corner, as far away from the pad as possible. Every last wire hooked into the thing. The Hub had ample energy sources, but even that wouldn’t come close to being enough for this. “How do we make it work?”

“It’s already working,” he said, pointing to the moving scanner beams. They kept moving and moving, trying to find something to lock on to.

She gave him another look.

“I need to get in touch with our guy,” he said. Andy groaned.

“So what are the chances of us being able to do that? I thought you said he was trapped in the middle of nowhere. It could be days before he manages to get in touch with us again.”

Jack shook his head. “No.” He gestured to the old Rift device. “It’s trying to latch on to the Rift. It’s going to keep trying to grab it, over and over again. And now that this thing’s on?” He looked up at the screen, still scanning away. “It’s going to try to hook into this system. It _wants_ to connect to something.” He nodded. “It’ll connect us again. I know it.”

“And until then?” Gwen asked.

He looked at her. “We find out how much time we’ve got.” He looked at Andy. He may have underestimated the guy. He pointed up. “Come on. Let’s get another reading of the Rift.”

The man’s eyes widened. He grinned. A second later, he cleared his throat and tried to look serious. “Sure!”

Unfortunately for him, Jack hadn’t seen his efforts. The man was already racing away.

* * *

The atmosphere changed after that. Everyone got into a fervor of work. Drive worked the computers with Notion and Sharp while the rest… Ianto didn’t know. They were in the vault rooms. No longer cataloging, but apparently going through the files trying to find links to people or places or information or… it seemed more like everyone was just shooting into the wind, trying to find something to stick. Something to make it all make sense. Ianto was no better off than the rest; he’d left the hallway leading to the vault rooms after Emrys and Elder had bothered him, but he’d frozen just inside the Office, his vision glazed as he took it all in.

How long had he been here now? How long had he spent staring at these walls, traversing these small rooms, learning this place’s secrets? How long had he spent taking notes, checking blood samples, learning the past of Torchwood Four? How much longer would he be here? Was this his existence now? Trapped here as penance for whatever he’d done to be a part of this madness, to have organs from other people safeguarded in one of this building’s vaults.

He shuddered and headed blindly for the computers.

Emrys hadn’t let up after Ianto had admitted to not knowing how one of the vaults could have been for him. The man had dogged Ianto’s halting steps out into the hallway until he was right behind him. He’d grabbed Ianto and turned him around. “How did we know you?” Emrys asked him. Ianto rolled his shoulder and backed away, turning his head to the side.

“I don’t know,” Ianto said. Emrys snorted, and Ianto snapped. “I don’t know! You think less than five days of memories makes me an expert? I. Don’t. _Know.”_

Heads turned their way. Elder stopped speaking with Gail and shambled over to them. “He’s right, of course.” Elder touched Emrys’ shoulder, gently pulling him from Ianto’s space. Ianto took the chance to get more space between them. “I know it’s frustrating to find more questions just when we get some answers, but at least now our questions have a focus. It may not feel like it, but this is progress. The climb may not be over, as we’d hoped, but we’re not at the bottom anymore.” Elder looked at Ianto, that affable smile never slipping. “And now we know that, whatever is happening here, Ianto is just as involved as the rest of us. He’s connected somehow. Which means he’s an ally. Let’s not forget that in our frustration.”

Emrys backed down, his teeth gritted. Elder smiled at him. “Come on,” the old man said. “Let’s go back to the drawing board. Everything we’ve learned. There will be something we’ve overlooked, I know it.” The old man looked at Ianto, up and down, and that smile altered into something very soft. “Why don’t you see what else you can find? I’m certain Drive would like the assistance.”

The man’s gaze had remained on him for a moment more before he led Emrys away. Ianto had watched without speaking – too stunned to speak.

_Ally._

_Just as involved as the rest of them._

He felt something clawing at the back of his throat. He looked down at his hands. What did he really know about himself? He had loved an impossible, complicated man. He had blindly followed that man. Had he been foolish enough to, what? Want to find a way around mortality in order to stay with him?

He didn’t know. He remembered his love being like an all-consuming fire, something that burned and burned inside him until he felt hollow, until he felt like one tremble of his heartbeat would send the entire construction crumbling.

Had he gone mad from it? Had he let that flame devour him entirely? Or, perhaps, had he always been twisted like this?

He wandered slowly further into the Office. Most seats were empty; everyone save Drive, Notion, and Sharp were back dealing with the contents of the vaults. That left the other three to look up murders in Sheffield. And, if the stack next to Drive was any indication, there was plenty of information to sift through.

At first, Ianto thought he was moving aimlessly. Soon enough, however, he was sitting in front of one of the many, many computers, his gaze skimming emptily over the screen. Without thinking, he opened up the old chat message box and typed.

_I’m a monster, aren’t I._

He waited a few moments, then thought about it and checked the date. Yes. Stuck. Of course it was; Drive was typing up a storm just a few desks down from him, and on the other side of the room, Sharp was printing out papers. Notion was scribbling furiously on a sheet of paper – one of a dwindling supply, Ianto saw – and looking up at his screen every few minutes.

He looked back at the message board. Nothing. And a minute later, still nothing. His heart rate slowed a bit as time proverbially ticked by. He closed his eyes.

_That’s what I thought._

* * *

“Got anything?”

“Yeah, a bunch of crap.” Andy held the Rift scanner up higher, as if doing so would give him the knowledge to make sense of the readings. Jack had to bite his lip to keep from smirking at the man. In reality, he wasn’t nearly as stupid as he sometimes acted, and he was trustworthy and loyal. He stuck by Gwen despite her oftentimes dismissive approach – sometimes a bit too much like his own, as if she’d become just as clinical as she’d once accused him of being – and genuinely sought out Torchwood’s help without envy or anger at being left out.

He also showed an admirable amount of patience for the way others often treated him, with dry humor and a sharp wit. Once he learned that impossible things were actually possible, he became a stalwart ally.

Jack looked him up and down, watching the man do a strange sort of dance with the scanner, waving it up and down like it was an old radio with poor transmission. “You know, I don’t think I’ve given you nearly enough credit, Andy.”

The man cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? Figured that, have you?”

Jack couldn’t help but smile at the attitude. It was deserved. “Yeah. I’m sorry about how I treated you.”

The man shrugged. “Already apologized, haven’t you? No sense in doing it more.” The man gave Jack a grin. “And I can’t say this isn’t cool. Creepy and weird, but cool.”

The scanner made a series of bees that almost made Andy drop the device. He fumbled it for a few seconds before hugging it to his chest and breathing hard. The man flushed beet red. “Uh, sorry ‘bout that.” He held it out and frowned. “It says a bunch of numbers.”

“Read them out to me,” Jack said. He listened as Andy gave him numbers and abbreviations, listing out letters since he didn’t know what they stood for. Jack mentally compared the numbers with those he’d taken just earlier that day and raised a brow. They’d actually gone _up_ in the past few hours. “How is that possible?” he asked out loud, his mind a million miles away.

“What?” Andy asked, looking from him to the machine back to him. “Is it bad?”

He backed away from the Rift. It couldn’t be what he thought it could, could it? Could the Rift actually be cracking itself apart once more? Or maybe… maybe this thing, in its efforts to grab the Rift and force a connection, was actually beginning to tear the thing open again. He paled. No. If that happened, Ianto’s sacrifice would be for nothing. He couldn’t let that happen. Whoever this person was, he would let them suffer in Torchwood Four forever before he let them destroy Ianto’s last heroic choice.

He waved his hand toward the scanner until Andy handed it to him. He looked over the results himself. Andy was right. They were all up. Every last one.

He started running. Andy yelped. “Hey! Wait up!” The man chased after him, huffing at the sudden switch from still to sprinting. Jack didn’t wait up for him. “What’s going on? What did those numbers mean?”

“Something’s wrong,” was all he said. He would have to make a choice. This life, or potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands, if he allowed the Rift to be reopened. Worse, Ianto… Ianto had given his last chance to return in order to close the Rift. To take on the last sin Jack had tried to commit in front of him. Suicide would never be allowed. Ianto would never let him give away his life, no matter how long he’d already lived.

He couldn’t. He couldn’t let Torchwood Four undo everything.

He’d already made his choice. All that left was destroying the transporter and leaving that one innocent person to die.

That was fine. He’d done worse so many times before.

* * *

November 22, 2031. Time had snapped away from the last date and stilled one this one. Ianto had watched the numbers spin, letting time float away from him. His fingers trembled where he sat. He wanted to disappear. He wanted _answers_. He wanted…

He wanted to _remember_.

He read and re-read the old messages, the ones he and Jack had written to one another back when he’d been alive. Back when he’d been _himself_. He saw sass and humor and… he didn’t even know if that was him. Had he always been like that? Or had he been the man who spoke bitterly about his father, who had never even called the man while he lay on his deathbed? Or was he the type of person who hid his sexuality in shame and fear, never speaking word of it for fear of reactions like his brother-in-law’s? Or was he the type to crash bulldozers into buildings without a shred of remorse who who might be inside? Was he the type to love someone hopelessly, even though that person hated even the thought of being with someone? Even though that person never so much as let him ‘scrape the surface?’ Was he the type to stand up to a tyrannical alien race and tell them they wouldn’t lay their hands on a single human child?

Who the hell was he?

He wasn’t the only person struggling with that question, at least. Everyone in this building, drifting lost through a white abyss, was frantic to find the answer to that same question. He looked behind him. He could still hear the movement, the voices. He was beginning to get used to the small noises of this place. The hum of so many computers, never turned off because what had they to worry about? Not energy drainage, not surges, not the computers lagging over time. The printer, spitting out paper after paper into Sharp’s waiting hands. The building twisting and settling around them, the stones and bricks of this tiny world grinding as this place maintained air and temperature in a place where there should be neither.

At moments like this, Ianto started wondering if he’d been here years instead of days.

He reached the bottom of the messages, his gaze once again stuck on the final one. _Looking forward to it._ Looking forward to it. He closed his eyes. He remembered his death more vividly than any other moment in the scant few moments he had to look back on. He remembered the poison, the immediate knowledge that there would be no escape, no deliverance. His time had ended, and his only thought had been how Jack would continue on. Continue on, and eventually forget.

His fingers hovered over the keys for a long, long time before he realized what he was looking at and frowned. The end of the message board. The end of the messages. It was always what he saw, every time, even though he’d sometimes contacted Jack centuries into the future. Even now, he couldn’t find that message he’d sent Jack, telling him to look for him in Torchwood Four. He took a deep breath. _Why don’t I see any of our previous conversations on here?_ He didn’t even realize he’d typed the question until he saw the question staring at him.

That was it. That was what he needed to do. Keep treating this like some sort of mystery to solve.

He was about to open a Word document when a reply popped onto his screen.

_I delete them all. Save a copy or eight for myself but take them off the message board._

He blinked at the words. They sank in slowly. _Oh_ , he responded, and just sat there, not knowing how to feel about that.

More secrets.

_You’re the one who told me to do it. Gotta keep the timeline intact. Can’t give you spoilers. That sort of thing._

_Oh,_ he typed again, stupidly, already rereading the message. He’d kept this secret from himself. Had he also kept others? Was _that_ why he couldn’t remember? Had he deliberately erased his own mind? Then was everything he was doing also pre-planned by himself? Had he _wanted_ himself here, typing to this man, losing himself in the mystery of his own secret life, digging until he found exactly what the old him had wanted him to find? Was he moving them all toward to some prearranged ending? Somewhere in his mind, was someone laughing?

 _Is that why you keep bringing the timeline up?_ he typed, thinking over the conversations. Wondering if this man was an ally of his or an ally of the old him. _Because of me?_

 _I don’t know,_ Jack responded, and Ianto grimaced. He wanted to break the monitor in front of him. _I don’t know what conversations we’ve had._ The answer seemed to hide something. He leaned back, narrowing his eyes. Jack was good at hiding things.

“ _I’ve only scratched the surface, haven’t you?”_

He knew better to think Jack was telling him everything. He probably wasn’t telling him a fraction of what he deserved to know. Why the hell had he loved this man? What the hell was he thinking, asking him anything?

 _But I’m looking forward to them,_ Jack replied, and he was lost. This man was too much for him to handle.

He responded. Like an idiot, he responded, clicking out a quick, _you at least enjoy my company, then,_ as if that had anything to o with what was on his mind. His gaze slid over to the scroll bar, the one that would lead him up to the conversations from Before, between the him he didn’t know and the lover he understood even less. What was the truth?

_I’m sorry if that was ever in doubt._

The words pushed the scroll bar even tinier, making way for a conversation that would be deleted the next time he connected to the outside world again. He took a deep breath.

 _But how could you?_ he typed. _Don’t you know what I’ve done?_

_Done? Ianto, what are you talking about?_

So he didn’t. He remembered that conversation on the steps of the city, where he’d said he’d only scratched the surface of Jack’s truths. He’d said he told Jack everything.

Apparently they were both liars. He remembered desperately loving Jack, not wanting to leave him, believing to the end that Jack needed him. He remembered that all-consuming, burning love and regret, the knowledge that every day they had was a borrowed moment, a blip in time. That they would always mean more to him than they could to Jack, even if Jack could think of them as a couple. Even if Jack _could_ think of him as something more than a passing fancy. Still, Ianto would always love Jack, and Jack wouldn’t be able to say the same.

That love was a real memory, one of few he could call his own, from start to finish. His pain over yet another secret, yet another demon Jack carried on his own, not trusting Ianto to stay with him if he knew. Not knowing Ianto would accept anything about him.

Not knowing, apparently, that Ianto was a monster, too.

He finds out, Ianto remembers. Because he asked Jack if he was a monster, and Jack hadn’t responded then. It was centuries in the future for Jack, so maybe… maybe he told him now? After all, what did he have to lose? The man was just a link to the outside world. If he lost that, his last chance to pay attention to time in any form would be lost. He would drift like the rest of the people here. He would exist, and that would be it. He could do that. For what he’d done, it would be the least of what he deserved.

_Ianto, what’s going on? How long have you been in there?_

_I’ve killed people, Jack._ No response. He chuckled to himself. Notion looked up at him for a second, then, seeing he was still preoccupied, looked back down to his screen. _I killed people, who knows how many, and I took their organs and stuffed them in an old safe box. Heh. We call them vaults._ A beat of silence. _I’m a monster._

 _You’re not a monster,_ Jack responded, so quickly it surprised him, _and you didn’t kill anyone._. From somewhere behind him, back in the hallway, Emrys shouted out a curse. Gail reprimanded him, the words sounding rote. The man stormed into the room. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man turn to him.

 _So much for no spoilers._ He rubbed his forehead. Emrys made his way toward Ianto. He held up his hand. “Is it vitally important I look at it immediately?”

Emrys made a face and slapped a folder beside him. On the label was a handwritten “The Lost Children.” Ianto cleared his throat. “What is it?”

“It’s you. You and some little girl.” The man waved his hand at the paper and walked away, visibly tense. All three of the men in the room with him raised their heads, their gazes landing on the folder. Ianto cleared his throat and scooted the folder closer.

The computer blipped at him once, twice, three times. He opened the folder and read the contents. There was blood lining the edges of the folder; it must have been in one of the vaults, squirreled away, separate from the rest of the folders and notes about this place. And he could see why. Each page was a simple piece of computer paper, the ink splattered as if worked from a pen near falling apart, or perhaps by a fevered hand. The lines of notes were all over the place, scribbled with such haste that the lines of text dipped up and down, nearly bumping into each other. He pulled the thing still closer and leaned down, squinting in his effort to read the text.

Another ping, and he started to understand what he was reading. A diary of some sort, only it was filled with information about – about this place, the vaults, and a young woman simply named “the little girl.” He rubbed his forehead. ’The Last of Erebus brought me here. The little girl was right. The twenty-first century is when everything changes. We have to be ready.’

Another blip, and he finally looked back to the computer, surprised to see several messages sent to him. _We’ve never had this conversation, and even if we had, I wouldn’t let you think this,_ the first message said, answering Ianto’s statement about spoilers. _You’re not a monster. Do you hear me?_

Ianto hadn’t answered, which had apparently spurned continued dialogue from Jack. _Torchwood Four was gone long before you joined even Torchwood One. Do you hear me?_

Now that was news. Torchwood One? He didn’t remember anything about Torchwood One. He knew he’d been a part of Torchwood Three. When had he been a part of Torchwood One? Had he been transferred? Perhaps Jack was wrong, and he’d been placed in Torchwood Four first.

He looked at his hands. Torchwood Four had disappeared in the nineties. How old was he? He looked young. Then again, so did Jack. Looks didn’t really count for anything. When was his birthday? He remembered his sister speaking with him about college, about his father’s death. He rubbed his face. How old had he been when he’d joined Torchwood?

 _You weren’t involved in what they were doing,_ Jack had wrote. It was stated as a fact. As if Jack knew what they’d done already. He breathed in deeply. This was from 2031. He’d contacted Jack in 2014. That was only seventeen years for him to contact Jack again. Or did Jack find out on his own in that time? Or did he already know, even when he was sending those flirty messages to him, back when Ianto had only been ‘scratching the surface?’

He sucked in a quick breath at Jack’s last message. _Ianto! Answer me so I know you’re still there!_

He only realized his fingers were shaking again when he started typing. He had to delete his attempt twice before it formed actual words. _I’m still here._

 _Good,_ Jack wrote back, his response immediate. Like he’d been hovering over his screen waiting for a reply. Ianto wondered if Jack was in front of a computer screen when he typed. He couldn’t be; he responded too readily to each of Ianto’s messages. He had to be using something else. Maybe a phone?

_You’re not a monster._

He looked at the words as they blinked onto his screen, soaking them in. As if Jack was right in front of him, trying to coax him out of his panic. He could almost hear the man’s voice. Even when things had gotten difficult, near impossible – even when things turned from back to worse, when there was a bomb in Jack’s body and everything had been turning to shit – even then, Jack had sounded so sure, competent. Decisive. As if he’d made a decision and by god, the world was going to bend to him.

_You’re the best man I know. And you’ll find your way through this. I promise you._

His breathing leveled out. His fingers stopped shaking. He took a long, deep breath.

_And I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. Anytime you need me, I’m here._

He looked back down at the scribbled words on the pages within the folder. Here was another clue. Here was another launching point. Here was something he could understand. Something he could _do_.

_Thank you, Jack._


	9. Chapter Nine

Erebus.

A personification of darkness, that space in-between life and death. The thought of it made something throb and ache in the back of his head, so far down that it felt like something was digging into the universe and dragging him along for the ride.

For Ianto, the feeling had no true explanation, but he was certain, as certain as he was of his own name, that it was the feeling of a memory trying to return.

A warning.

The rest of the folder’s contents were just as alarming; the initial page was more cryptic nonsense about the Last of Erebus and the dire warnings this “little girl” had given about the twenty-first century; each was written as if scrambled in the person’s head, each word breaking to the surface in crashing waves. It looked like madness given form.

Ianto spent a long time piecemealing the information together until it took on something more coherent; Sharp and Emrys got into a long, heated discussion, their gazes often turning toward Ianto as they spoke. Sharp – Lloyd Harrow – got more and more tense as the conversation continued, until Ianto found himself pausing every few seconds to ensure they hadn’t come any closer to him. Thankfully, Sharp got pulled away, no longer on printer duty but instead relegated to helping Elder and Gail bark orders at those in the vaults.

‘We’ve all seen it. The end that’s coming. None of it can stop it. None of us have the chance. But there’s one. One, and another, and oh, the Last of Erebus was alight with them, with them all, brilliant, shining things. The little girl had eyes that said she’d seen. It must be why she gave us this gift of madness. So we could learn. And oh, I’ve learned.

Make them live, and the world will be ready for anything. Keep him hoping. We’re mad, and evil, and bloody, but we’re going to keep them alive so the world can be ready.’

He tapped his fingers against the top of the desk. It was all in riddles like that. He glanced back over his shoulder, toward the hallway. The ‘gift of madness’ was rather self-explanatory given the condition of the vaults. But what was the Last of Erebus, and what did the writer mean by the thought of Erebus somehow granting them madness? He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He’d bounced the knowledge they’d all gained off of Jack the next time the numbers on the computer monitor stilled, but Jack refused to tell him anything. Ianto was getting sick of protecting the timeline.

After that first page of nonsense, the rest actually tried to catalog what they’d done. In that, he received news of more than just those inside this room. There had been others – others that they’d found in the records, others whose replacement parts awaited them in the vaults, even though they were nowhere inside the building. He learned of ‘the other,’ the one they’d prepared for even though they didn’t know his name. That, more than Jack’s assurances, helped him believe that maybe he hadn’t been a part of this, after all.

The list of names also provided some new material. One: none of those names weren’t in the official records somewhere; Ianto asked Notion to help him track them down while the computers struggled to connect to time again. The man had found every single one, each of them people who had joined in the decade or two before the building had blinked off of Sheffield’s map. Every single male name had been run through the same tests they’d all taken, ones performed by Emrys or the doctor before him.

Not a single one of those names or tests came back positive for Elder.

He was an unknown quantity. An unknown _person_. He just… existed. Like Ianto, he didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the group, yet there he was. With them, from the very start. No memories, just like them. An untimely visitor to the building? A new recruit despite his age? Or something a bit more than that?

Was the old man just _pretending_ to not remember?

Ianto had called Notion over a couple more times, not to speak with him about anything in the folder – he wanted to keep it to himself for a bit, if Emrys hadn’t already shared the details with everyone; he was a bigger busybody than Ianto would have originally anticipated – and had asked him to give him some of his best conspiracy theories. They’d been even wilder than before, but some of them were oddly close to the mark. Other than the cannibals one, there was the one where they were all secretly performing some sort of alien test on themselves, another where they’d gone mad from alien secrets, and another where they’d become unwilling hosts to said aliens.

Ianto had a bad feeling it might be a mix of the last two.

The diary had gotten less and less organized as the writer had continued. The list became a retelling of what appeared to be a bunch of visions became a random amalgamation of ramblings, each sentence heading in a new direction, each one blocked together in a single, solid paragraph that spanned almost two pages, until it became an unbroken litany of ‘make it stop make it disappear make it nothing nothing nothing.’

He sat back, unable to make sense of it, and finally stood. He needed to think.

“Done?” Drive asked. Ianto looked at him. Dack Atworth, eternally twenty-three years old, born to a Nia Atworth, previously Nia Diamond, and her husband, Deshawn Atworth, in Sheffield. Born and bred, he’d moved to London for a short time before returning to his place of birth. Likely like Ianto himself, he’d been sent back to Sheffield to help operations at Torchwood Four. Torchwood One had been the ones to spot his genius and get him to join. The man barely looked up as Ianto slid the folder off the table, but the line of his shoulders said he’d noticed.

“Not hardly,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “But I’m going to need far more space if I’m going to have a chance at understanding all this.” He shook the folder slightly and headed over to the lobby, grabbing a few more pieces of computer paper as he went. He didn’t think he could make sense of this without understanding the sudden Greek references. He would start there.

He didn’t feel a headache coming. Apparently such things couldn’t exist in this space. But it certainly felt as if he _should_ have one.

  
  


!i!i!i!

  
  


“No, Jack. I won’t let you.”

Jack paced in front of Gwen, ready to tear his hair out. Ready to tear _her_ hair out. “Look. The Rift’s energy is spiking. That’s not what closed Rifts do, Gwen. We can’t take the chance of it opening.”

“Then we had better work fast.”

He sized her up. Hands on her his, chin lifted, lips pressed tight together. Eyes wide, but steady. The look that said she wasn’t backing down. He stopped pacing and went to her. Andy, behind him, watched with the gaze of someone knowing one of the two in the scene was pistol-whipped. Jack wasn’t happy to realize that person was him. “Gwen. If we connect to that place, we could tear the Rift open.”

“I don’t think so.” He huffs. She growls. “I don’t think so, Jack. I’ve been looking at those readings too, you know. They go up and down like mad. Spiking when a connection’s made, then dropping out again.” She waved a hand toward the computers, also clearly indicating the Rift monitor. “I understand you’re panicking.” She leaned forward, and here came the Bambi eyes. “But you’re wrong about this, Jack. There’s no danger to us or to Cardiff. You don’t think I’d be awful enough to let that happen, do you?”

Jack grimaced. All around him was evidence of Gwen’s commitment. When he couldn’t care anymore, Gwen had picked up his slack. This place was back only because of her. He hissed in a breath. “What does it say?” he asked.

Gwen led him to the screens and punched in a few commands. He noted each of them before focusing on what she’d pulled up. “These are the readings for the past few days. Up and down, see?” She pointed to the thing as if he couldn’t, in fact, see. “Don’t even know why you bothered going over there.”

To get the hell out of this place. He raised his hand, palm up, toward Andy. The man handed him the scanner. “You know very well we get more accurate readings with this.” Gwen gave him a look that said she wasn’t buying what he was selling. “And sometimes I like going old-school. Mostly because you get stuff like this.” He showed her the final few readings on the scanner, the way they went inexorably up. “These don’t show how strong the Rift is or how powerful its pull. They show the spacial distortion _around_ the Rift. And it’s getting worse. The danger is real.”

She pulled the scanner toward her. He didn’t let go of it, forcing her to lean in to look over the readings. Because of that, he had a prime view of her moue of disappointment. “All right,” she conceded, backing away again. “But it’s not a lot. This thing is already trying to connect–”

“Which means it could do far worse if it did,” he said.

“But it _doesn’t_ mean the Rift will open again. It can’t. You said so yourself.” Those damn Bambi eyes were back. “Were you telling the truth on that? Because you have yet to explain how it happened.”

And he wouldn’t. He would never explain how he’d been willing to sacrifice himself, to end everything, just for the sake of seeing Ianto one last time. Seeing him, and never having to live eternally without him.

He thought about the blast. It most certainly would have sealed the Rift; if any crack had remained, Syriath would have used it to escape into their world. He rubbed his face. If there had been a chance in hell of getting it back open, Jack would have used it. Ianto sealing the Rift with the detonator he himself had intended to use. Sealing himself inside with Syriath, with the dead. The rest of the dead. He sucked in a sharp breath. “If you gave me the rest of my eternal life,” he admitted, “I wouldn’t be able to open that Rift again.” He looked back toward the machine he and Andy and Gwen had rigged up; the transporter to save this one lost soul. His heart cascaded in his chest. He could do here what he hadn’t been able to do for Ianto.

Was that why he’d done all this? Why he’d entered this insanity with such fervor? Because he wanted to be able to save someone lost to time and space, in a way he hadn’t been able to save the one man he’d loved more than anyone?

He closed his eyes and turned away. It couldn’t be about that. He couldn’t _let_ it be about that. He needed to make an intelligent choice. A rational one. “It would weaken the Rift,” he said finally. “We would have to set up shop here again.”

“That’s fine,” Gwen said.

“You’re still wanted,” he pointed out. “We both are. The government hasn’t exactly lifted us off their list.”

“What, really?” Andy asked.

“We’ll deal with it,” she said with a nod. The nod that said ‘it’s decided.’ “This will weaken the seal around the Rift, but afterward, it will be able to close properly. If we let this go, who’s to say the seal won’t eventually weaken on its own? There’s danger either way.”

He rubbed his fingers over his mouth. Started to pace again, only to stop and glare over at the transporter. At this point, even if Gwen wasn’t right, she would choose to go through with this, anyway. He gritted his teeth. “Fine. But we find a way to control that before we go, or we don’t go at all.”

Already, Gwen was turning to the monitor, calling up the newest readings from the Rift as they came in and comparing them to the jump recorded when Jack got those texts. “No problem. Andy?”

“Yeah,” he said, jumping at the mention of his name and coming up to Gwen’s side. Jack backed away, watching the woman whip those around her into shape. “I’m going to need you to monitor this while I try a few things. Got it?”

Andy cautiously made his way in front of the monitor. “What am I looking for?”

“Large spikes in the graph,” she said, pointing to the obvious line bobbing up and down, recording the Rift. Jack looked down at his own scanner. The Rift was widening. Ianto had closed it only five years before. Gwen had acted as if there were only two solutions: connect fully to Torchwood Four and transport themselves back and forth, potentially weakening the seal further, or allowing it to continue unabated. There was another option. Find a way to break the link.

He breathed in deep. He didn’t know how to do that without completely sealing the Rift. And he didn’t know how to do _that_.

He walked off, letting Gwen corral Andy into helping her with her assignment. He would need time, but he was certain he could find a way to disrupt everything. Hell, he could choose something as simple as sending a ticking time bomb through the transporter instead of them. That was a thought. Blow up Torchwood Four, destroy the transporter trying so desperately to latch the place back to Earth. The connection would still occur; they might cause trouble with that, but it was infinitely better than leaving it open for some unknown length of time as they tried to figure out which of those within the lost building’s walls was the one who wasn’t involved in the near-genocide that occurred in Sheffield before their disappearance. They’d barely managed to cover the deaths. It had taken a lot of retcon and a false newscast of an epidemic racing through the city.

Other than that, the only other choice was to try sending a wave of Rift energy so wild it burst through the transporter. He wasn’t thrilled with the idea of trying something so similar to what he’d planned to use to close the Rift. What _Ianto_ had ended up using on the Rift.

So. Bomb, or let Gwen go of her savior spiel one more time. He walked away from the medical bay, away from his office and the computer terminal and… his feet led him to the Archives. He shuddered just inside; he’d been right. It wasn’t nearly as methodically ordered as Ianto had once had it. Things lay all over, in boxes, on the floor. It did, however, look a lot clearer than it had previously. He supposed bombs took care of many things, even alien ones.

Ianto. Always, in the back of his mind, was Ianto, hiding out with all the other ghosts of the people he’d loved and lost. He didn’t even know why Ianto was exceptional, why, out of all those he’d felt so strongly for, Ianto was the one he couldn’t handle losing. Maybe it was because he’d had so little time with him; even less than he usually did. Maybe it was because Ianto had _always_ been exceptional, from the first moment he’d seen him. From the moment he’d named a Weevil and called over a pteranodon with chocolate.

Ianto wouldn’t want him to leave this man alone in there. He would want to take the chance. Up to the very moment before it was too late, Ianto would try to save him. So Jack would do the same.

He stared again at the long, long room, the boxes and papers and general mess. He would have to lift his legs high to avoid bumping into something or stepping on something else. It likely hadn’t been touched since the items had been moved back here, dug out of the rubble and replaced once the building was rebuilt. Ianto would be horrified.

The file cabinets were shiny and new, pushed up against the walls. Boxes sat in front of and beside them. He rubbed his palm over the top of one. Not even enough time to gather dust. He closed his eyes and hung his head.

Until Torchwood Four was a bit safer for them to retrieve, he had time to kill. He bent down and opened the first box.

  
  


!i!i!i!

  
  


He caught them.

Ianto hadn’t meant to see anything. He’d hardly meant to head back into that hallway. He’d only gone because he’d needed a copy of the test results in order to organize everything properly; he couldn’t remember everyone’s blood types or exactly which organs or how many each person had waiting for them.

He’d entered the hallway in time to find Lounge actually awake and moving around, his gaze lingering a bit too long on the blood on his hands. On his hands, because he’d opened one of the blood samples and emptied the vial into his palms.

Ianto scooted quickly back into the Office, his heart beating near out of his chest. He heard footsteps from within the hallway and dared peek back out. The man played with the blood, rubbing his fingers together until a sick squelching sound echoed through the space. It drew the others like moths to a wet flame; he watched as Ajim and Emrys both came, gazes transfixed, to the man’s side and dipped their hands into the blood as it dripped, dripped, dripped to the ground. Gail cupped her hands beneath Lounge’s hands, stopping the slow flow. Ianto held his breath as Carmen peeked her head out. Her eyes were wide as saucers. She, too, could not look away.

From behind him, Notion and even Drive, finally pulled from his computer, walked to the entrance to the hallway. Ianto pulled away as they neared.

What in hell was going on? He watched the two men join the others. Watched Sharp dirty his hands in the blood, as well. He hurried back over to the computers, his mind nipping around itself. He eyed the papers he’d placed on the floor. He couldn’t leave them. He was starting to see something. This might be the madness that was spoken of. But why now? Why was it presenting itself in this moment? They’d taken blood samples. There had already been blood in peoples’ hands. To test it, it would have had to meet open air, be smelled. So, what? Had no one touched it? Why had Lounge?

He was surprised to see the date had settled once again, and despite himself, he hunkered down and opened up the message board. His first thought was to send an SOS, but for what? How could Jack get here? So he ran away all over again, trying to keep quiet, and grabbed up the papers as quickly as he could without making an undue level of noise. He checked the movements of the people in the hall, but they never turned from the sight of the blood slowly spreading to every last one’s hands.

Once he had everything again, he ran back to the desk and spread the notes out once again, taking over desk after desk, no longer caring about seeming polite or helpful. His notes had picked apart the notes, choosing only the pieces that demanded repetition. Those parts were clearly more important, enough for the writer to fixate upon. He scribbled them down in order on the back of one his pieces of paper.

The Last of Erebus.

The little girl.

The twenty-first century, and the need to be ready.

‘The other’ – likely himself.

And ‘the lights,’ which is what the other’s companions came to be called over time.

The little girl was linked with The Last of Erebus, which apparently had given the writer the vision that led them to believe the twenty-first century would be ‘when it all changes.’ He didn’t yet know what that meant, but from the writer’s attempt to recount the vision, he could only imagine it was bad.

 _‘Blood. Blood, and not blood, and death. So many gone, lost. So many little ones. But it can be stopped. It will be, if the right people are left. Not us. We clean up. Yes, we need to keep the world clean. We need to keep it from getting bad. But in making it good, we make it bad. One way to make sure the bearer of the light comes back, clears up our mess. The last mess. It’s right, anyway. The lights go out too fast, too often. We need one to remain, at the very least. That’s how we can help. We can_ help _.”_

The idea of _helping_ was prevalent, too. During the countless murders that had to have occurred, these people had been telling themselves that they’d been _helping._

Any way Ianto looked at it, this ‘little girl’ had manipulated events in order to lead them to this point. To lead Torchwood Four to The Last of Erebus, whatever, whoever, that had been. To make them think the twenty-first century was important. To lead them to madness, madness enough to make them think killing a bunch of people would lead to helping Ianto and… and who? The others of Torchwood Three? He… he remembered Jack, and Gwen. And he thought there might have been others? In his mind, during the explosion, he’d been reminded of other explosions. A dark night… something else. Ianto couldn’t recall it that well; it was a memory within a memory, and it hadn’t been as important as whether Jack had survived or not.

He stared out into the hallway again. Everyone was starting to move, to return to their duties, it looked like. But none of them had made any effort to wipe the blood from their hands.

“Blood, blood, and not blood,” he muttered, and hid behind the bank of computers and desks. Nerve endings jumped beneath his skin, flooded with adrenaline. But he had nowhere to go. He forced his breathing to remain calm. Best to stay ready and try to look as unsuspecting as possible. Maybe it would make sense for him to have moved his things if he actually interacted with the computer.

The date on the screen told of the twenty-first century, but only barely still. When he opened the message boards, he saw nothing but the old messages, as usual. He typed in a quick _distract me?_ and hovered anxiously beside the desk. Drive – young Dack Atworth – made his way back to his old computer. His gaze fixed itself onto Ianto. He desperately tried to act like he didn’t notice.

Jack responded, thank everything, and Ianto engaged with him, let him talk about what he was doing, even asked a couple quick and stupid questions. Dack sat down in his chair and started typing again, leaving a red stain on the keyboard. Ianto shivered. Notion sat down with his notes and started writing with his finger. Ianto bit his lip.

 _So why am I distracting you again?_ Jack asked. The words glared out at Ianto from the screen. His fingers clenched as the sound of Sharp’s shoes clacked against the hard floors.

 _Everyone’s – I don’t understand. There’s a weird vibe in the air. But nothing’s caused it._ He listened. Emrys was no longer shouting in the corridor. In fact, he couldn’t hear anything at all. A shiver raced up his spine. Sharp went up to the printer and just started playing with the buttons. Leaving red marks. He ran his thumb over the entire control panel, leaving a bright red smear. The man stared at it.

‘Weird vibe in the air’ was perhaps a slight understatement. He might want to rectify that.

_Everyone’s… playing with it all. The blood. And they’ve gone quiet. Something’s happening._

He dared glance up again. And froze. The people in the hallways had entered the room, silent as tombstones. Every last eye in the room was on him.

The computer pinged.

_How long have you been in there?_

He glanced down for only a second before looking back up at everyone. They weren’t moving. They were hardly breathing. Blindly, he reached out for the keyboard.

_Too long._

The computer quickly dinged again, but the group as one began to move, and he scooted away from the computer, some instinct making his fingers clench around the papers next to his hands and yanking them with him as he hurried backward toward the other room. The room with the cells. Maybe he could get one closed, lock himself inside.

For all the good it would do him. He would simply be trapped inside that tiny room forever. For _eternity_.

But it was a chance. It was _something_. He ran for the end of the hall and, not looking back, slammed the door to the cells closed. There was nothing to lock it; the lock it had once held had been opened, and it was on the opposite side. He leaned against the door. He couldn’t hear anything. Suddenly everyone in this building seemed like ghosts. Murderous ghosts.

It took a long time for him to force himself into some semblance of calm. He checked the room. No large vents, no other doors. Unless there was some sort of secret passageway in this place, he was safe. So long as the door against his back remained closed.

He looked at his hands, still scrunching several pieces of paper within them. It wasn’t everything, but it was _something_. With trembling fingers he straightened the papers. If there wasn’t anything in this to help him understand what was happening, he would be faced with having to take these guys out in order to defend himself. He clenched his eyes shut, then took a deep breath. He could do that. If he had to, he could do it.

He started to look around the room for something to use as a weapon when he stopped. A single word had caught his eye. It was just as chicken-scratch as the rest of the words on that page; it was the very last one, the one that ended with a single run-on sentence, no punctuation to separate the demand to make it all disappear scribbled madly in spattered ink. _Resurrection._

He read the sentence. _We will be the gods of resurrection._ _We will be Coatlicue, and the other will be our Huitzipochtli._

‘The other.’ Him.

He had no idea who Coatlicue or Huitzipochtli were supposed to be. Aztec gods, clearly, with names like that. But unlike with Greek mythology, he wasn’t exactly up to snuff with each deity or their respected stories. He wished he’d seen that little bit when he’d still been in front of a computer.

From that sentence on, however, the descent began. The writer began speaking of returning the other and disappearing, then fell into _make it all disappear_. _‘Enough, enough! Make it all disappear! We have enough; we are only the harbingers; we see and know and prepare and the other will be ready because we are ready it’s too much now we just keep going there is no end make it stop the voice in my head screaming are we ready? yes but we’ve gone too far make it disappear now_ now _it’s time it’s time make it nothing nothing nothing’_

He leaned back hard against the door and scrubbed at his face. Then he carefully folded up each paper and slid them into his pants pocket. He still heard nothing from the other side of the door, but he was no longer certain that meant anything. They could all be sequestered behind there, just waiting for him to move away from the door or to come out. He eyed the cells. He could run for them, try to lock them closed. He would have even less room to work with than before. He looked again for a weapon, but the best he could see were the pillows sitting unused on the cots. This room was nearly empty of anything. He’d have been better off chucking the computers at them.

He had to go back.

These people were real. They were victims. In a perfect world, he would be able to help them. But here, alone? With no one to help him, in a tiny place that drifted outside of space, outside of time?

Something scraped lightly against the door. Almost, he jumped away. He tensed. He hadn’t seen any guns or anything, but that room filled with alien things could very easily hold numerous types of weapons with untold abilities. He could be leaning against a rapidly disintegrating door for all he knew.

He held the door shut and dared lean away for an instant, just to make certain that wasn’t the case.

Without a proper defense, there was nothing to stop those twelve people from doing whatever they wanted with him. He was pretty sure he knew how to punch, but to take down twelve people? Even if two of them were old and another couple women – even if one of those women wasn’t named _Soldier_ by those same twelve people – there were too many men likely just as able to throw a punch.

He needed something better than a pillow.

Carefully, slowly, he picked himself off of the door and inched further into the room. Cell after cell surrounded him, each open to the elements. Going on a hunch, he went to the one Lounge had been sleeping in and started rifling through the cot. Underneath the pillow was nothing, but beneath the mattress of the cot was something hard and slightly heavy. He pulled it out to find himself holding an old, thick book. A glance at the binding told him it was a book of poetry. He turned to the door.

It would have to be good enough.


	10. The Other Side

“Jack!”

He turned. Two empty boxes lay at his feet, the start of an actual filing system returned to the Hub. He closed the cabinet drawer he’d been organizing and turned toward the entrance to the Archives. “What is it?”

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” Gwen stopped for a moment to get her breath back, then looked around. “I never would have expected…” She trailed off, but he could guess where her mind had gone.

“Yeah, well.” He dusted off his hands, even though there was no dust save for on the folders themselves, and moved toward her. “What did you need?”

She pointed behind her. “We found a way to make it safe. Well, safer.” He was already moving, brushing past her to hurry back. She skipped after him, half jogging in order to keep up. “If we use the Hub as a sort of, I don’t know, portal? Center? If we use it as a sort of wall, we can reduce the effects of the transporter. Create a sort of force field.”

“Nice work.” He thought he understood what she was trying to say. The transporter was a sort of doorway into the Rift. Which left it vulnerable. If they could find a way to stick that door inside of a building instead of within the stone that made it, then they could keep the world around the door a little safer.

“Andy thought of it,” she said, sounding almost surprised. He would have been, too, only he was beginning to suspect Andy might be a sci-fi nerd.

“How?” he asked.

“I guess with his brain.”

He rolled his eyes as they stepped into the main room of the Hub. “No, I mean how did you do it?”

“Oh.” She rubbed her nose, trying to hide the flush in her cheeks. “Right. Well, we sort of linked the Hub to that cube of energy.”

He didn’t listen to another word, just ran toward the volatile energy source and checked it. Andy stumbled out of his way as he neared, bumping into the wall of the medical bay. “Readings?”

“No bad reaction with the Rift,” Andy said, picking up the scanner. He’d left the thing on the corner of the stairs. Jack hardly glanced at it; he couldn’t imagine Gwen letting Andy check those readings on his own, and she knew what to look for.

“No imminent explosion, no radiation leakage, no chance of it leaking or blowing a cube fuse.” She leaned down. “I think this is it, Jack.”

He took a deep breath. “And the Rift energy? Has it spiked?”

“Not yet,” she said. He walked over to the computers, leaving the wires and vacuum tubes behind. If nothing else, Gwen had tried. It was a potential solution. They could check it out, make sure it had even a chance of working and not messing up the transporter–

He clicked on the computer screen just in time for the alarm to go off.

“Something’s happening,” Gwen said. Jack scowled. So much for tests.

“We’re connected.” He pulled out his phone and opened up the message board. Ignoring the reminders just above the last thread, he started a new one.

* * *

Ianto yanked the door open and raised the book high. Then stopped. He’d expected a horde of people zombie-style lined up just outside the door, waiting for him to weaken so they could feast. Instead it was only Carmen, standing alone, hair wild, hands red, waiting wide-eyed for him. “It’s time,” she whispered.

He lowered the book only a little, still ready to bash her face in should the need arise. “Time for what.” He didn’t ask it like a question.

Instead of answering, Carmen turned slightly to the side, leaving him room to step around her and enter the hallway. He did so slowly, scooting his feet, trying to keep ready to hit and run if he needed to, or perhaps to run back into the room. She didn’t move toward him. She didn’t move at all. He kept his gaze on her as he moved around her, but for a moment, it was pulled away. A bright red stain sat on the back of the cell door. ‘The other.’ He swallowed. Great.

Carmen’s gaze followed him as he slid along the wall toward the office. Her eyes looked empty, yet hard. Like rock. He upped his pace.

Just past the hall, Ianto saw the rest of Torchwood Four’s inhabitants. They stood in two parallel lines, each facing each other, each body creating an enclosed path from the hall toward one of the computer desks. The one, specifically, that he’d been sitting at before he’d had the sense to run. Suddenly looking up the name on the paper seemed extremely unimportant.

For a moment, he considered trying to run back. When he turned, however, it was to find Carmen, now standing in front of the door. He had a book to hit her with. That did not guarantee getting her out of the way. And the rest? How would they respond to the action?

He stared at each face in turn. Shape, usually shy, stared him directly in the eye. They all did. No expressions – even Sharp’s face remained entirely impassive. He frowned. He saw Gail, Emrys, Dack, Ahim, all of them staring blank-faced as he looked upon them. The woman once known as Soldier stood just beside the computer, her body straight as an arrow next to Braylee, the woman so prone to accidents she should have been named Daphne. Every face he’d come to recognize during his interminable time within this building – save Elder.

Where was he?

Slowly, Ianto made his way forward. No one jumped at him. No one so much as blinked. Yet they all watched him, gazes unwavering, as he was forced to follow the path laid out for him. He dared look down at the monitor when finally he came to stand just behind the chair. He swallowed.

2014\. The date had changed again.

He looked back. The papers crumpled in his hand. Right. Without sitting, he leaned over and opened the search engine. He typed Coatlicue into the search bar. Someone moved. His gaze snapped up.

Elder.

He stood at the edge of the room leading to the vaults, far away from the line the rest of Torchwood Four had created to direct him. Despite Elder’s entrance into the room, only Ianto seemed to make note of his passing. Ianto forced himself to take a steady breath. He’d already noted Elder to be different, to not be a part of the gathering around him. This was merely confirmation.

His fists clenched.

Elder looked up and down, taking in the others. “What did you do?” he asked.

Ianto’s lips pressed tight together. Was this another trick? Well, if it was, he would play along. For now. “I ran into the cells when they all started acting strangely. What about you? Why aren’t you like them?”

Elder took a single step further into the room, hunching down. His hands fiddled nervously before his chest. He looked, suddenly, like a mouse. “Then – this isn’t you, is it?” The man came closer, though he sidestepped the line as he advanced. Even as he stared at his coworkers, he shivered. “They started acting strangely all of a sudden, all as one. It was as if I didn’t exist any more. They haven’t reacted to me in the slightest since, either. But you! You – look at them. They’re all turned to you. It wasn’t the cells they were interested in, was it?”

Ianto didn’t half understand. “Slow down and start from the beginning.”

“I was speaking with Gail when she just…” Elder waved a hand toward the woman, staring at Ianto as unblinkingly as the rest. “It was as if she no longer saw or heard me. She and the others put everything back on the shelves, pretty as a pickle, and just waltzed into this room and over to the cell door. I couldn’t find you. So, I thought…”

“You thought I did something to them,” Ianto said, and Elder nodded.

“Maybe you still did. I don’t know anymore. Everything changed when you showed up.”

Ianto looked away.

As one, the residents of Torchwood Four took a single step closer to him. He jumped and stared at them. The footsteps, in perfect chorus, echoed off the high walls of the old building. He put the computer to his back and faced those around him. He lifted the book.

The clack of low heels snapped throughout the room. Behind the line of people, Carmen stepped through, coming ever closer to him. On some sort of instinct he didn’t understand, he whipped back around to the computer, double-clicked on the first link – a Wiki page – and right-clicked on the webpage. A quick scroll and click ordered the page printed. The printer whirred to life a moment later.

He turned back to Carmen. Even though the printer was doing its nineties screaming routine, the only one to react was Elder. The old man jumped and yelped. Carmen didn’t so much as blink. Instead, she pointed to the computer. “Huitzilopochtli,” she said. Ianto frowned.

“What?”

Elder scurried over to the printer and picked up the first page as it slid out. “Coatlicue?” he said, reading the headline. “Why are you looking at something like this?”

Coatlicue. A strange name that could only refer to an Aztec deity. His gaze snapped over to Elder, though he didn’t turn his face from Carmen. “See what it says about Huitz – about a god whose name starts with H!” he said. “Quickly!”

Elder jumped at his tone, then stood opening and closing his jaw. After an eternity, he looked back down at the paper. A second page slid from the printer and fell to the floor. “Uh, uh… this is on some goddess of childbirth,” he said. “Why are you–”

“ _Quickly!”_ he said, as Carmen pointed again. The people on either side of him took another step forward. The space in between him and them became cramped. He sucked in a breath.

“Right!” The old man fidgeted where he stood, his gaze slipping between the page and the motionless people right next to him, hemming Ianto in. “Uh, it says here that Hui-tzu-lo-poch-tli,” he said, sounding out the name as he read, “oh, my, I probably butchered that. Anyway, it says he was born after his mother, Coatlicue, was killed by her four hundred children. Wow, that’s a lot. He killed them all in return for the trespass.” The paper crinkled in his hand, then, “oh! Some variations – the ones more beloved by the Aztecs, apparently – say that, instead of being born after her death, he was born just in time to prevent it. A big deal to the Aztecs. Who knew?”

Ianto frowned. “And Coatlicue?”

“Like I said, some Aztec goddess of childbirth. Apparently childbirth was a big deal in Aztec, too. They linked it to life and death and rebirth.”

Ianto stiffened. His immediate thought was Jack. If ever there was someone who embodied the idea of rebirth, it was Jack. But the feel of the odd journal had been that _he_ was Coatlicue. “The other.” Had he read it wrong? It wasn’t impossible–

Everyone save Ianto and Elder took another step forward. There was no more room between him and the bodies all around him; he couldn’t breathe without pressing himself against the others. Adrenaline sent his muscles jumping. He could no longer pull out the chair if he wanted to. He wasn’t certain he could turn.

“Ah, you may wish to hurry!”

Ianto looked at Carmen. Unblinking eyes, unmoving expression. The names of the gods made him think of Jack. Did she know about him somehow? Did she expect him to, what? Give Jack to her? Make him come here? Trick him? Ignore him? Side against him?

Whatever she wanted, he didn’t care. Throughout his whole time in this place, there had only been one true constant in his mind. He loved Captain Jack Harkness. He didn’t know how, or why, or when it had begun, but he knew that one thing for fact. His every chat with Jack on the computers here had only confirmed it. His heart skipped a beat when he saw Jack respond to him. He felt himself smiling when Jack sent a stupid joke. He worried. He yearned. He wished to reach across the monitors to Jack’s skin.

He loved Jack. Of everything in this world, that was the one truth that remained his.

He turned. It was difficult; no one moved for him, nor did they let him move them. Eventually he just elbowed limbs out of his way, smacked some shoulders with his book, and scooted beneath the chair, contorting himself into an acute angle in order to reach the keyboard. He reluctantly put down his makeshift weapon and typed a sequence of numbers and letters into the search bar. The entry opened up access to the messaging system. Then he stopped.

At the bottom of the system was not, as usual, the last message between himself and Jack before he’d died. It was instead one of the messages he’d sent on this system from this very room – the one in which he’d joked about finding Torchwood Four and had been greeted, not with easy camaraderie, as was the norm for most messages, but with vitriol. Jack had sent him a death threat for daring to speak to him.

For the first time, he logged onto this messaging system and found that what he’d sent before hadn’t been deleted.

He glanced over his shoulder. Carmen wasn’t making any aggressive movements. Yet. He looked back. If it weren’t for the press of bodies, he would have jumped. This computer, unlike the one he’d been on for most of his stay here, hadn’t been muted. A loud trill sounded through the room. Accompanying it was a message.

_You’re connected!_

Ianto read the words three times before he could get his fingers to stop shaking and work. This was the first time Jack had ever initiated a conversation with him. Why now? Was the man psychic or something?

_I… yes? Wait, you know when I’m connected?_

The reply came fast and sharp, with yet another high-pitched chirp. _I might have made a transporter, and it might have just locked on to your signal, so yes._

 _That’s_ , he wrote, dazed by the information, then stopped.

A… transporter. A transporter?

_Hold on._

Why the hell did Jack have a transporter? He looked over to the faces crowding around him. He’d just been about to warn Jack to stay _away._ These people had to know. That was why they were acting off. They knew this was happening. Somehow, they knew about Jack’s transporter, about his plan to arrive here. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from hyperventilating.

No, this was even more than that. He looked at the bottom of the computer screen. The date remained the same. He wondered, suddenly, when it had changed. When had Jack made his transporter? When had it locked on to his signal?

 _Locked on?_ He typed as he thought, wondering what it had locked on _to_. _Signal?_ Exactly what signal were they putting out? Was it one that had the ability to alter people’s personalities, to force their actions? Was there something like that out there?

_Yes, try to keep up._

It was ruder than Jack’s usual communications with him, but maybe the man was busy, too. Maybe there was some strange dilemma happening in the real world, too. Something big, like the 456. Maybe it was connected to whatever was happening here.

He’d spoken to Jack so many times. Over and over again, throughout Jack’s immortal timeline. Throughout the span of over 500 years, he and Jack had sent messages to one another. Over and over again, Jack had hinted that there would be more. That they had more to discuss, more for Ianto to tell Jack. More for Jack to tell Ianto. _Spoilers._

_I need you to turn on the spaceship you have in there._

He stared at the words. His mouth hung. Someone shuffled, and he stiffened. A quick check showed it was only Elder. Ianto turned back to the monitor. _You know about the spaceship._

Of course Jack did.

_Yes, and I need you to turn it on._

Easier said than done. He could barely move within this small cone of people. Just standing up straight would be a battle hard won.

_If you do, I can transport myself into Torchwood Four._

It felt as if something like metal jammed into his spine, forcing him to try to straighten, anyway. _You don’t want to come here_ , he typed, ready to warn Jack, as he’d originally intended. But even as he typed, Jack replied.

_Oh, I have no intention of staying. I’m coming in, grabbing you, and heading out._

Ianto read the words again. So. Jack already knew it was dangerous to come. Then why? He looked around again, taking in the empty faces. No matter how creepy they were being now, the fact remained that these were real people. People he’d spoken with. People he’d come to know. People who needed help. He eyed Elder. _There are others here._

A short pause, then, _I know._

_You’re not going to try to ‘grab’ them?_

_We’ll deal with them when we get there. You’re our first priority._

We? Yes, of course. Ianto remembered Gwen, and even Gwen’s husband. This was a Torchwood mission, then. Torchwood. He straightened his shoulders. _Okay. Guess I’ll get the spaceship turned on, then._

_Great. See you in a few._

Ianto’s heart sped into overdrive. See him? That was right; if Jack was using a transporter and intended to come to Torchwood Four, then Ianto would meet him. For the first time since he’d supposedly died against the 456.

He was going to meet Jack.

He lifted the book. It was cumbersome in one hand, but he could still get a hell of a swing in. The impassive faces all around him didn’t so much as flinch. He lifted his chin. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he would have the chance to finally meet this person, to finally find out what it was he loved about the man. The only things in his way were these people.

They would not stop him.

* * *

Jack looked up from his phone and waved it at the others. “All right! Our little friend on the other side is going to turn on the spaceship, and then it’s time to rock and roll.” He pointed to the transporter pad. “Gwen, Andy, get on.” He moved to what Gwen had begun calling the cable box and double-checked the cords, keeping them separate from one another. Wouldn’t do for the heat to end up melting the things together or anything.

Andy pointed at himself. “Me, too?”

“Of course you, too!” Gwen said, slapping the man on the shoulder as she hurried up onto the pad. Jack saw her checking her gun again, then yanking Andy up and checking his, as well. “You’re just as much a part of this team as the rest of us – far more than Norton.”

“Hey!” Norton shouted, but no one cared enough to listen.

“All right,” Jack said, standing. It would have to be good enough. Any more checking was just a nervous tick at this point. He stepped onto the pad, as well. The thing got very cramped very quickly. “As soon as our messaging friend turns on the spaceship, it’ll connect.”

Gwen frowned. “Jack, it’s already turned on, isn’t it? That’s why it’s been latching on to the remnants of the Rift.”

He chuckled. “It’s idling, sure. Probably has been for a very long time.” Perhaps it even had to do with how the Red Key had managed to take the whole of Torchwood Four for a ride. “But we’re gonna need a whole lot more power if we’re gonna find the energy necessary to link ourselves to wherever they’re floating.”

“So it’s like starting up a car,” Gwen said.

Jack shrugged. “Something like that.” He looked toward the hub’s computers and frowned. Whoever was over there had tried to warn him away. ‘You don’t want to come over here.’ A warning. But for what? “Be ready for anything,” he warned again. He didn’t know what they were going to be arriving into. He just hoped his curiosity didn’t lead them down the wrong path.

* * *

The residents of Torchwood Four were certainly willing to lead him to the spaceship. Specifically, they didn’t let him go anywhere else.

While he didn’t need to beat anyone’s faces in to be allowed through, he found himself once again surrounded on all sides by everyone as they moved, as if in some practiced coordination, slowly into another makeshift path that led toward the opposite hallway.

Elder dodged around them, his hands twitching, shaking the paper still clutched in his wrinkled fists. He looked back and forth between Ianto and the others before tripping into place beside Ianto. For every step Ianto took, Elder took one from the safety of the open space beyond. The hallway leading to the archival room, however, was blocked on either side by Soldier and Sharp. Only Ianto would be passing through. “Wad up the papers and throw them to me,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. He didn’t know what would happen if he reached out and tried to move a part of his body past the line formed around him. He didn’t know what would happen to Elder, either. Best that they avoid either scenario.

It took Elder a few seconds to seem to understand what Ianto was saying, and though he fumbled the papers for a second, he did as told. “Throw it carefully,” Ianto said when the old man was nearly finished. “We only have one shot at this.”

“Oh. Right. Of course.” Elder aimed, then aimed again. Then aimed again. Ianto sighed. Elder tossed it, underhanded, off toward Ianto’s right. Ianto barely grabbed it before it bounced off of Sharp’s shoulder.

“Thanks,” Ianto said. He hurried into the hallway before the group could get angry at his lack of progress, quickly uncurling the papers. He skittered back as Sharp and Soldier shifted. They blocked the passage back out. “Okay…” He lifted his voice. “You should probably keep away,” he said, speaking for Elder’s benefit. “Just in case.”

“These are my people!” Elder said. Ianto took a single step forward, only to jump when the line closed in further behind him. He watched Soldier and Sharp with wide eyes. “I can’t just not do anything!”

It was the words, as he came up on the first open door to the vaults, that made his brain grind in a new direction. He looked to the vaults, to the safes and, within, the jars upon jars of remains. Elder didn’t have any remains. Ianto had wondered if it might be because he’d been too busy overseeing everyone else’s collections, or perhaps because his vault had been lost somewhere. But how could that explain the lack of information on Elder when they’d found info on everyone else?

He wasn’t there because _he wasn’t there_. He wasn’t a member of Torchwood.

The idea made Ianto’s jaw drop. Everyone called the old man their elder. Everyone made him their leader. And he _wasn’t_. He wasn’t the leader of this branch of Torchwood. He wasn’t even a _member_.

He was most likely an innocent bystander who just got caught up in this mess.

He stumbled past the first door, the revelation leaving him reeling. He’d been so caught up in how these people had chosen to interpret their world that he’d found himself making the same assumptions. Letting himself be led. He hurried forward then, his gaze skimming quickly over the papers, his mind skipping over it piece by piece, desperately trying to make sense of it. Why choose Aztec imagery? Why call him Coatlicue when he was definitely _not_ giving birth to anyone anytime soon?

With every step he took, the crowd followed after him. He saw the riot of curls denoting Carmen’s presence within the mass. Soldier, her gaze never leaving his face, led the charge. Her name had to have been given to her for a reason beyond how stiffly she held herself. He wasn’t thrilled that she’d been positioned right behind him.

He passed the final open door to the gore-filled safes and made it to the entrance to the artifact room. The fluorescent lights were no stronger in here than in the vault rooms, yet even with the dark shadow from the broken spaceship splayed across the floor, the atmosphere of the room was much brighter than the vaults and the hallway filled with the ghosts of the people he was trapped with.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Jack,” he said. He moved to the spaceship.

“Huitzilopochtli.”

He jumped a mile high. He spun around. Behind him, the congregation of zombies had, as one, turned to point to the spaceship. “Huitzilopochtli.” Then, again, “Huitzilopochtli.”

His heart pounded up into his throat. What the hell was going on here? He looked down at the papers, but his senses kept buzzing at him to pay attention to what the others were doing, and the time it took to search for Huitzilopochtli’s name took too long. His breathing quickened. Huitzilopochtli was supposed to be the son of Coatlicue, right? Maybe they were mixing metaphors, thinking of Coatlicue as the Virgin Mary. Maybe these people had worshiped Jack. Maybe they were awaiting his arrival like Jesus. But then _why_ use the Aztec religion as their metaphor?

Whatever. He had to hope the cavalry would help. It had to be better than dealing with this alone.

Jack. He wanted to see Jack.

He shoved the papers into his pants pocket and jumped onto the spaceship’s broken plating. The thing wobbled for a bit – the spaceship had apparently been held up and balanced with tethers at some point, and Ianto had only failed to notice because the cables were largely on the side that leaned against the wall. He certainly _felt_ it, however, as the floor of the ship rocked beneath his feet. He threw out his hands, pinwheeling to stay upright. In front of him lay the Star Trek arrays and that strange console, the one that needed either one tall and one short person or someone with far more prehensile limbs than Ianto had.

“Okay.” He took a deep breath and turned toward the hallway. He could hardly see it past the group of people now standing in a crowd before the doorway, packing themselves so closely together that they nearly leaned on each other. Each pointed to the spaceship, chanting the name of a god that had nothing to do with any of them. He rubbed his hands on his pants. The paper crinkled from within his pocket. “Okay,” he said again. He looked at the consoles. “No problem.”

The buttons in front of him beeped blue over and over again, but one, he found, kept beeping yellow in a distinct pattern. It wasn’t Morse Code or anything, but it was definitely a pattern. Going on a hunch, he pressed it down.

A swatch of colors lit up then, and he grumbled under his breath and the changed display. “Instead of mumbling on about old Mesoamerican gods, maybe these people could try giving me some instructions?” He didn’t even bother looking toward them to see if they would; he knew better.

“Are you messing with the ship?” Elder asked. His voice sounded a bit off suddenly. Ianto dared a glance up, but he couldn’t see the man past the row of blank-faced crazies lining the exist from the room. He decided to take a chance.

“Yeah, I am! Why?”

He still couldn’t see the man, but he could hear him moving around. When the group took a step closer to him, he could finally see Elder again. The man was clutching the side of his head. He leaned against the wall leading into the room as the once monotonous refrain of Aztec gods became slightly garbled. Carmen started hissing, “rebirth, rebirth, rebirth,” like some broken mantra. In another moment, all of them were hissing and whispering like snakes. It was somehow creepier; they still clogged the path out, but they were no longer in a single, uniform line. The zombie-like procession had actually been less terrifying than this loss of even that cult-like control.

“Butterfly,” Elder said. His voice was drowned within the din, but Ianto could hear it. It was, after all, the only voice that hadn’t turned into a hiss. “Butterfly,” he said again, and shook his head. “I can see it. While I…” He went quiet.

Ianto had no idea what he was talking about. He looked back over the buttons and switches. Nothing looked anything like a butterfly. Screens beeped; a few looked like they were reading out longitude and latitude, almost like the radar scenes in movies or on their old SUV. Others looks like they were charting a three-dimensional field. Those were the things flashing the brightest blue.

“I don’t see a damn butterfly!” he said as every single person’s hissing turned to wailing. The building shook. “Shit!”

The place was shaking apart. Trying to decide whether to latch on to wherever Jack’s Torchwood was – their Torchwood got destroyed in Cardiff, so maybe Jack had made a permanent settlement in London somewhere? – or remain floating aimlessly through time and space. He needed to hurry it up. But how? It wasn’t like he had any memories of his time in Torchwood to help him out here. Why hadn’t he asked Jack how to do this?

He looked back to the yellow lights. They didn’t spell butterfly, they didn’t blink out butterfly, they didn’t blink the array of lights in such as way as to symbolize something like a butterfly. There was nothing ‘butterfly’ about it. He was about to ignore Elder’s words when the older man spoke again. “Break butterflies on wheels. I remember – I remember someone saying that. When I asked about the thing. Something about breaking butterflies on wheels!”

There were no wheels.

Wait. That was an old saying. ‘To break a butterfly on a wheel.’ To do something unnecessarily tedious and difficult to complete something simple. In short terms, ‘overkill.’

He looked at all the yellow buttons and, going on that old hunch again, clicked every single one, in the order from the area of the first button he’d pressed outward. He felt ridiculous; surely clicking every button haphazardly had to be the cartoon equivalent of trying to stop a crashing plane. The thing bucked under him like it was trying to throw him out.

The hissing turned to mumbles, until Ianto couldn’t pick Elder’s voice out if he tried. He growled as the lights kept flashing, now blinking back and forth between yellow and red. “Well, how am I supposed to know!” he snarled, and barely kept his balance as the building shuddered and screamed. It felt like the whole place was about to split apart. He was about to curse when he saw the red lights blink out in unison – almost like a Rorschach picture. _The_ Rorschach picture. “What do I do with the butterfly?!” he shouted.

“Do the thing!”

What the hell did that mean?! He glared at the picture, willing it to make sense – then four lights flashed the brightest blue he’d seen yet. He was about to shout for more information when he saw the same blue light up on the controls. He looked back down at the ‘butterfly,’ then back at the controls. It was telling him to use them.

He grabbed the controls at the top and searched the things. They were not unlike the wheel used for arcade games, but with a few extra nodules. He looked the thing up and down and found the small hooks, likely for alien fingers, that were lit up on the display of buttons before him. A few, however, the ones on the bottom, didn’t line up.

“Oh, hell,” he said, and looked below him.

The two controls on the floor. Those were lit up, too.

He slid himself forward, kicking off his shoes and to hell with how it would mess them up. With socks on his feet, he hung on to the controls in front of him and hung off them like monkey bars in order to reach the controls far beneath the panel. He had to feel the thing out with his feet; the angle he’d placed himself in made it impossible to see anything but the metal console directly under his chin.

Finally, he found his best approximation of where to hold the controls and grabbed as well as he could. Beneath the pads of his fingers, he could feel something click on the knobs of the wheel he’d grabbed. He tried to push in hard enough with his toes to feel the same, but he couldn’t be sure. He grunted at the effort and adjusted his grip, nearly losing it in the process. The building cracked. The sound was like thunder. He jumped, jerking his grip on both wheels. They moved. The blue light flashed all over again, so bright he had to close his eyes.

“Ha! They did it!”

Ianto jumped again. This time, he lost his grip on the controls and fell to the floor of the ship. His eyes widened. He recognized that voice. From his memories.

“I can’t believe it! That pile of junk actually worked!” Another voice from his memories. Female. He held his breath. This was real. He’d done it. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. It’s a miracle that thing stayed together. And a bigger one that this other person figured out how to use the one on this side when you _forgot to tell them how.”_

“No need,” that beautiful voice said in a huff. “They clearly already knew.”

His breath turned choppy. The one thing he’d held on to in here. The one thing he’d _had_ to hold on to. It was finally here. _He_ was.

Jack Harkness. The man Ianto remembered loving.

He scrambled out from underneath the console panel, now lit up in an array of colors dizzying to the eye. He ignored it for the voices. They came from behind him, from the area where the spaceship had ripped apart. He leaned forward, and there they were. Just like that. The area they stood, just past the edge of the broken spaceship, in a spot blackened by what looked like some sort of tiny explosion, stood two men and a woman. He recognized all three, though the memories of one were hazy, barely there. But the other two. The woman with the black hair and duck lips and wary stance, her back leg already scooting into a bent position as she took in the muttering people clutching their heads before her. And Jack.

Ianto’s breath caught. Somehow, the man was even more beautiful than his memories had described.

No, that wasn’t right. He looked thin, almost gaunt, with a stubble that looked just barely on this side of unkempt and a slant to his shoulders that seemed so sharp it might have been brittle. But he was still more gorgeous than anything Ianto had remembered. That cleft chin, the way he cocked his hip as he took in the inhabitants of the room, the curve of that back and that waist and those long arms.

“Well, look at this reception!” Jack said, and that cocky voice stabbed straight through his memories into his chest, taking away his breath. This was real. He’d done it. “Now, which one of you do I have to thank for bringing me here?”

He crawled out from the spaceship, letting his body slide off the broken side of the wreckage to the floor. His movement caught the attention of the black-haired woman – Gwen. She turned, pulled out her gun – and froze. Her eyes went wide. Her jaw dropped. Ianto’s focus, however, was still on the man in the trenchcoat. “Jack?” he whispered.

Jack whirled around. His trenchcoat whipped around him like a cape. He, too, held a gun, this one pointed at the ceiling. His eyes widened on Ianto, as well. “Ianto?” he asked, breathless, that cocky voice trembling. Ianto saw that finger on that gun shake.

“Jack,” he said again, his voice finding its foundation. He stood straight, though his knees shook. His memories, the few he’d retained and had clung to so tightly, had been real. He knew this man. The shape of his nose, the exact tones and shades of his eyes. The slight shift in his posture, the way his feet turned slightly outward, that spoke of tension and distrust. The meaning of that last one only hit him when Jack lowered his gun toward Ianto’s face.

“Take off that face, or I’ll take it off for you.”


End file.
